Nvidia To Bring WHQL-certified PhysX Drivers On August 5th

12:10 - Thursday 24 July 2008 by Theo Valich
Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: nvidia, physx, geforce, gtx, drivers Category : Graphics Cards

Santa Clara (CA) - After demonstrating beta drivers featuring GPU-accelerated physics on 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament III (GeForce GTX and 9800 boards), Nvidia is getting ready to release the official Windows driver.

This driver will support PhysX acceleration on all capable GeForce 8, 9 and GTX cards, while carrying Microsoft’s WHQL certificate. More importantly, the new ForceWare driver is expanding PhysX support to all currently available PhysX titles on the market, including Ghost Recon 2: Advanced Warfighter, Warmonger and Cell Factor: Revolution.

We expect that downloads of free games such as Warmonger and Cell Factor will actually spike once again in August, since now those games will be playable on a variety of cards.


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NoOnions 24/07/2008 12:19
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NoOnions
Anyone know what kind of performance hit this will cause? I have a 8800GTS OC2 (640MB). If part of my GPU is doing physics calculations, won't frame rate just suffer to compensate?
waxdart 24/07/2008 01:58
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waxdart
NoOnions - It will be like kicking your GPU in the nuts and you'll have to upgrade, run two cards or run at a lower res with the levels set to mid or low.
NoOnions 24/07/2008 02:38
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NoOnions
Lol! Thanks waxdart! Pretty much what I expected. Lots of pain for no gain. I've seen the 'proper' PCI card on sale for about £58 but can't see the point really.
sosrandom 24/07/2008 04:05
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sosrandom
People currently running ut3 say they've had no performance problems
JDocs 25/07/2008 10:17
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JDocs
Sosrandom yes they don't because they aren't using a PhysX intense map. The PhysX mod includes a map called "Tornado". Before the PhsyX driver a 9800 managed about 10FPS, after the driver it managed over 50FPS. The PhysX only uses idling SPs so it doesn't slow graphics down. Quite the opposite, if the GFX needs all the SP for some reason PhysX doesn't use any GPU power.
NoOnions 25/07/2008 02:54
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NoOnions
Hi JDocs

I'm slightly confused here then. If you enter a PhysX enabled map and part way through your GPU needs all its power for GFX, not physics calculations, won't that cause issues? Won't the game slow to a crawl anyway as your GPU is trying to process graphics commands and can't cope with the map's demands for physics processing? Or is UT3 and the like clever enough to reduce the demands for physics calls on the fly? I suspect that the current games cannot. My guess would be that a graphics card is either powerful enough to do both or not? Please let me know your thoughts.

Regards,

NoOnions
NoOnions 25/07/2008 02:54
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NoOnions
Hi JDocs

I'm slightly confused here then. If you enter a PhysX enabled map and part way through your GPU needs all its power for GFX, not physics calculations, won't that cause issues? Won't the game slow to a crawl anyway as your GPU is trying to process graphics commands and can't cope with the map's demands for physics processing? Or is UT3 and the like clever enough to reduce the demands for physics calls on the fly? I suspect that the current games cannot. My guess would be that a graphics card is either powerful enough to do both or not? Please let me know your thoughts.

Regards,

NoOnions
NoOnions 25/07/2008 02:56
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NoOnions
Page cannot be displayed error and then a double post - sorry readers!
JDocs 28/07/2008 08:00
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JDocs
NoOnions, yes actually that did happen but it was fine until they went above 1650x1080. Besides a second graphics card, say a 8400 / 8500 (no SLI support required in this instance) dedicated to PhysX would be a lot cheaper than a Aegia PhysX card. For those with a single card this solution is a middle ground. Sacrifice 10% GPU performance for a 400% total gain sounds worth it. Also who really uses a single card to go above 1650x1080?
Anonymous 29/07/2008 01:51
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I already tried the UT3 Physx mod with 8800gt handling graphics and 8600gt handling physx, and there was no difference in FPS to having the 8800gt handle both physx and graphics.
I'm going to try again when the new physx drivers are released, by i feel im losing FPS by having the PCI-e run at 8x.

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