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My Test of GRAW running with and without physX

this is pretty sad news, i was looking forward to what ageia had been promising for so long... if cellfactor, a showcase that was built from the ground up to show off physx is unplayable on a quad sli system then what use is this card to us?
 
n3x said:
this is pretty sad news, i was looking forward to what ageia had been promising for so long... if cellfactor, a showcase that was built from the ground up to show off physx is unplayable on a quad sli system then what use is this card to us?
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Have to agree with you there. I am doing a major upgrade next week and I was going to include one of these cards. After reading many forums and articles I have to say there is 0 chance I will be buying this card now.

Seems to me that the implementation is very bad. Ageia needs to get some damage control going VERY quickly. £200.00 for a card that slows graphics down to unplayable frame rates on the best machines out there is really unacceptable. I have a bad feeling that if Ageia dont get a handle on this quickly they will be yesterday's news.

S
 
Capt Doufos said:
It makes sense it hits the FPS though. If there is twice as much going on onscreen, ie extra objects. Then there is more for the GPU to render which means at the same settings you will get a FPS decrease.
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on a quad sli system? the world has gone nuts lol

What doesnt make sense is why have ageia spent so much time and money producing somethin that appears to be useless?

Im still hoping they cant pull something good out of their hat...
 
Capt Doufos said:
It makes sense it hits the FPS though. If there is twice as much going on onscreen, ie extra objects. Then there is more for the GPU to render which means at the same settings you will get a FPS decrease.
Click to expand...
True, except the only problem with that is that surely the whole point of PhysX was to unburden the CPU. If it doesn't (which would seem to be the case, as I can't believe Icemans system(s) are GPU-limited) then its just adding additional eye candy that the CPU hasn't got time to deal with anyway. The CPU - even if its not actually doing the physics calculations itself - still has to communicate the results to the graphics card(s).

The real acid test for PhysX imo will be in a game that has two completely seperate execution paths - Havoc or equivalent for people without PhysX, and 100% PhysX for those that do.

From a programming perspective I think this would be quite a significant task, I don't think Havok would lend itself to being something that can easily be switched on or off in a game, since physics is as integral to the game as AI is.

Also, I can't really begin to think of the ramifications of having to wait for a piece of hardware (other than a graphics card) to do something before the game is able to continue... with something like physics where often scripted events require precise timing (e.g. a load of boxes falling to make steps for the player to jump up), the results could be quite unpredictable. That's just speculation on my part though :)
 
Remember though please, all of you, especially those who like to read certain bits and forget bits that don't fit your opinion, these were only very quick tests on Cell Factor and I have a sneaking suspicion the 84.21's aren't helping the frame rates. Even in low graphics mode, I get ~25fps, the vids were running an awful lot better than that.
 
AGEIA PhysX 2.4.3 B1 Driver Test


I have just tested the new drivers and can confirm that I am still getting a large performance hit with the PPU enabled I am using forceware 84.56, here are a couple of new with and without shots,

Without PPU 1280x1024 : 36 FPS



With PPU 1280x1024 : 19 FPS :(



Thats 17 FPS difference

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Without PPU 1024x768 : 50 FPS



With PPU 1024x768 : 27 FPS



Thats 23 FPS difference
 
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That looks "underwhelming", the particles dont add anything to the scene in terms of making it more realistic (not that Ive unloaded a sub-machine gun into the street IRL).
 
Note on my latest test of the new Ageia drivers that the lower the resolution the bigger performance drop is when you have the PPU enabled, surely that would prove that this is definitly not a problem with the GPU but with either the way Ubisoft have implimented the physX code or the PPU it's self,

but then throw [ui]ICEMAN's test of the PPU running poorly with cellfactor into the mix and that makes things even more confusing, i'm not sure whether it's an implimentation problem or a hardware problem :confused:
 
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Cyber-Mav said:
its to reduce development times. with dedicated ppu less coding needed for physics and faster to pull games out then.
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Your probably right but it seems like it just encourages ever more sloppy code so as it turns out its of no benefit anyway :confused:
 
when the first 3d accelerators came onto the market, like the voodo card etc it was an obvious win win situation.

this ppu is a flop and not flop as in floating point opteraion :p
 
I was skeptical of the whole PPU thing when I first heard about it and although having been 'proved right' by a performance hit when using the PPU, this is to be expected I think. It's the whole eye candy / fps trade off, like AA. I'm not sure it's worth £200. Plus you can't just introduce a card and expect people to pay the extra. People have a budget, if they buy one of these it means buying less poweful cpu / less ram / cheaper mobo etc. But it's early days for PPUs.. if it was £20 and ten times better I might get one (or £200 and x100 better) :)
 
There's always a positive, should the frame rates not be up to par with a non ppu system, other physics hardware developers will have to design their products to higher capabilities. Ultimatley it could mean that an all in one card with revised interface architecture will be required, whoops that has console written all over it.

I think we are beginning to reach a point of saturation with add on components, to many interfaces causing slowdown during communication. How this spells out the future for mix'n'match pc's is unclear.
 
btw if you have Crossfire, rename the exe file to AFR-FriendlyD3D

This forces Crossfire to work in alternate frame rendering mode, even without a profile, so basically it works like SLI.


Before doing this with max details I was getting around 35fps, Now I'm getting around 80-90.

So there is some room for the Ageia to work at an acceptable rate, however the issues of the frame rate dropping regardless will still remain, it will make the game playable though.
 
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