Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You may remember Kieron doing science a few weeks back about NVIDIA’s CUDA system – clever trickery that allows a GPU to perform processing feats other than pixel-pushing. There’s a lot of real-world algorithm-crunching applications for it, but of most interest to gamers is that it can make your GeForce 8, 9 or 200-series card behave like a PhysX board. NVIDIA bought out PhysX makers Ageia a while back, and we’re soon to see the fruits of such money-labours.

The big question is to what extent simulating cratesplosion will slow down the graphics rendering. We’ll get to find out next week, with the release of the GeForce Experience Pack.
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And because I like my shout-out to lovefoxx strap for this piece so much, I’m going to re-use it here. The most influential man in British videogames journalism, Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell, showed the sheer extent of his influentialitude by making me trot off and actually cover a hardware event. Me! In this case, NVIDIA talking about their near-future plans involving - basically – allowing you to turn your 3D card into a PhysX card via software and even repurposing your old 3D card as a PhysX one when you upgrade. Apparently. They could have told me computers would be able to produce milk and I’d have been equally credulous. Go read here. There are jokes and local colour.

I’ve got an Ageia PhysX card sat around somewhere, a piece of hardware about which I wasn’t entirely complimentary a while back. I don’t use it because a) there’s yet to be a PhysX-enabled game which I’ve wanted to play for any reasonable length of time and b) it’s one more furiously spinning fan in a PC that I can already hear humming like the wrath of Skynet, even when I’m on the next floor of the house.

But maybe, I thought, Unreal Tournament 3 would be the game to change all that. Eyecandy junkie that I am, I was quite looking forward to testing the explodability of the PhysX-only bonus maps. Tech know-all types Bit-Tech have kind of talked me out of it before I’ve even got a copy of the game, with one page of their typically graphics-centric review of UT3 putting the boot particularly hard into the PhysX stuff. The screenshots sure look good, but it sounds very much as though my feelings about earlier games with PhysX support tending to end up looking like an explosion in a polystyrene factory aren’t going to change any time soon. Worse still, it seems the super-duper maps run at under 10 fps. That’s an ultra-whoops for Ageia, surely. Oh well. I may still be able to summon the energy to remove my PysX card from its dusty anti-static bag once I’ve got hold of UT3, but don’t bank on it.

So, what now for this increasingly beleagured hardware experiment? Can it possibly recover from even its most high-profile implementation turning out to be a little bit tragic? And does anyone else reading this have a PhysX board?