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ASUS PhysX P1 GRAW Edition 128MB (PCI)

By Vincent Chang - 20 May 2006

Game Impressions and Performance Part 1

Game Impressions and Performance Part 1

The question on everyone's lips is predictable: does it work as advertised? Ageia has touted a respectable figure of up to 60 developers and more than 100 games in development that supports PhysX but many of these games are in the early stages. Based on our experiences fiddling around with the few games and demos currently available, here are our individual impressions for the games:

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

The hotly anticipated launch title expected to spark the beginning of the PhysX era, this new game in the Tom Clancy franchise left us feeling rather disappointed. After all the hype, we expected to find some spectacular jaw dropping effects. Instead, what we noticed for the most part were black bits of dirt springing forth from everything that we shot at. Fire your rifle at a wall and you'll find these black bits flying out and landing on the ground before disappearing shortly. Shoot at the ground and black bits. Shoot at a car and black bits again. Practically everything that we shot at gave us the same black particles. It's a novelty that quickly dies off after the first few minutes. The explosions followed the same vein, with larger bits that flew up and rained down on the ground like black snow before disappearing abruptly. This was extra eye candy but besides the exploding bits, the presence of the PhysX card did not seem to contribute anything significant to the game play. Of course Ageia would disagree with this simplified layman's opinion of what actually goes on under the hood, if this article is any indication , but frankly, we believe the average gamer would have similar sentiments.

The standard explosion in GRAW looks decent enough even without the PhysX card.

More exploding bits and pieces are seen when the PPU is installed.

It would be understandable if GRAW appeared under-whelming as many debut technologies find it tough to live up to expectations. However, what would be outrageous to the early adopters who have shelled out the big bucks in anticipation for better performance is the unfortunate fact that frame rates actually fell when the PPU kicks in, i.e. during a big explosion.

We averaged more than 60 frames without the PPU, something that would change quite drastically once the hardware was installed.

While this screenshot is not an exact reproduction of the previous explosion shown in the screen without a PPU, it is a close approximation of the frame rate situation when an explosion occurs in-game. You will definitely notice an abrupt drop in performance when it goes boom.

We were not the only ones to experience lower frame rates and Ageia's latest 2.4.3 driver even hints at improving this aspect of PhysX performance. Over the course of a short test sequence (where we ran around, shooting at stuff and throwing grenades), there seems to be a slight drop of an average of two frames (48 versus 50 frames), which is not too bad. However, we still suffered momentary dips in frame rates when the explosions go off and it started to rain PhysX debris.

The obvious cause for the decline in frame rates is probably the result of the increased amount of debris and particles enabled by the PhysX card, leading to a greater workload for the graphics processor. Frankly, the explosions and other effect in GRAW looked quite good already and the black bits actually seemed more unnatural to us than the default gray debris found without a PPU. Could we live without such dubious eye candy? Definitely. Overall, we doubt that GRAW by itself would be a compelling reason to get anyone PhysX'ed up for the PPU. The physics enabled effects seem unnecessary mostly and unless you get your kicks from seeing more shrapnel in explosions, it's hardly worth the entry price of a physics processor.

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