Legit Reviews

I am wondering if they are worth getting. Building the system in my sig, and wondering if i should think about getting one.

i see no system in your sig.

PhysX cards are/will be useless especially since GPUs will be doing Physics once the time comes (8800GTX already can).

They are already useless.
The prcessor for physics on the card is not even that powerfull.
Even though it is the way of the futur I wouldn`t speed 200-300 bucks on something you will not use.
Games have to support physics and so far only 2 or 3 games do.
And I wouldn`t even count GRAW because its a little rushed out addon for the physx that does`t do nothing but lag your game and add some little particles flying.
Later on you will be able to let`s say buy a cheap nvidia card and just use it for physics and it will already be a lot more powerfull then the Physx card.

Bigedmond wrote:I am wondering if they are worth getting. Building the system in my sig, and wondering if i should think about getting one.

Let's see I wrote the review on the card on May 18th 2006 and haven't used it since... http://www.legitreviews.com/article/346/1/

I do still use it on PSU testing though...

There is no point in any of the games that I have played using it. For the past year it's sat on a shelf collecting dust.

I heard something that it depends on the physics engine the game uses havoc or some other one and most games use havoc and don't support it, but a few newer games will be designed around the other physics engine to take advantage of it but yeah I'd never bother with getting one.

one of my friends has it in his system, and its completely not worth it for the price

Yah I have a friend that has it too.
It was nice playing the demo it came with but besides that its laying there doing nothing.
He tells me he should have kept the 300CAD $ and buy something else.

It's only a gimmick... Multicore CPUs can handle the physics of any games without problem. Vista's gpu abstraction makes it possible for games to use a portion of the gpu for physics. The future shows CGPUs, where your CPU has an array of vector processing cores that are faster than any GPU today. In this future, you will not need any GPU / PPU / APU / whatever other "PU" anymore. You will only have one CPU, like it should be. That new chip will be flexible enough to accomodate all kind of tasks, from x86 generic code to heavily parallel floating point operations.

So, no, don't throw your money at physx cards.

Vincent

InsolenceAndHeresy wrote:i see no system in your sig.

PhysX cards are/will be useless especially since GPUs will be doing Physics once the time comes (8800GTX already can).

sorry, forgot to hit the sig button

Yeah, they are a great idea, but will need to be implemented in the CPU or GPU. Physics in future games will be awesome if this happens.

It will happen.

I think I read somewhere that the X1900 alone can do circle bounces 14,400 times faster than the PhysX can (CustomPC magazine I think it was).

Apoptosis wrote:

Bigedmond wrote:I am wondering if they are worth getting. Building the system in my sig, and wondering if i should think about getting one.

Let's see I wrote the review on the card on May 18th 2006 and haven't used it since... http://www.legitreviews.com/article/346/1/

I do still use it on PSU testing though...

There is no point in any of the games that I have played using it. For the past year it's sat on a shelf collecting dust.

Hate to admit it, but if I get something like this, I would have it in my system just for bragging rights.

I'd rather have two GPUs outputing to 3 monitors than worry about added physics.
I still can't understand why nVidia and ATI hasn't figured out how to have a SLI setup make 3 monitors run in HQ and be able to game like that. It would be pure in flight sims and even in many FPS.

Tim Burton wrote:I'd rather have two GPUs outputing to 3 monitors than worry about added physics.
I still can't understand why nVidia and ATI hasn't figured out how to have a SLI setup make 3 monitors run in HQ and be able to game like that. It would be pure in flight sims and even in many FPS.

With the prices of LCD's dropping... good point.