Ageia PhysX 2.5 WHQL

Windows XP, Windows XP Media Center 2005

We've just posted the third official Ageia WHQL release of their Physics driver for the AGEIA PhysX card. AGEIA believes that games can be at far better quality once you will not only calculate pixels but also common real-world physics by a special processor. So in a way you could look at the PPU as an adon for a GPU. The new product that they will be releasing has no less than 125 million transistors on-board, which is the average transistor count of your current DX9 mid-range graphics card.

The only way to get real physics with the scale, sophistication, fidelity and level of interactivity that dramatically alters your entertainment experience is with the AGEIA PhysX processor, which was developed from day one to accelerate the highly specialized physically based simulations. And the only way for serious gamers to get true mind-blowing physics in gaming is with a PhysX Accelerator add-in card available today from leading game system vendors such as Dell, Alienware and Falcon Northwest.

This driver is certified Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) supports the Microsoft® Windows® Logo Program for hardware with the Hardware Compatibility Test (HCT) kits, test information, and data for hardware testing and driver signing. Visit the PhysX Experience (physx.ageia.com) to see exactly what AGEIA PhysX can do for your games.

Hardware/Software Rigid Bodies

• Enhanced Rigid Body Sweep operation
• Improved sleeping object/actor operation
• Fine grain multi-threading
• Greatly raised object and joint limits
• Dynamic hardware acceleration management
• Adaptive force improvements
• Improved pulley and joints force propagation

Hardware Fluids

• Improved SPH implementation
• Fluids depth smoothing
• Multiple fluid surfaces
• User defined particles supported
• Fluid interactions with rigid body.
• Note: There are workarounds to get the same effect.

Hardware Cloth

• Application control of stretching and bending resistance parameters
• Advanced two way rigid body interaction with cloth
• Attachments to cloth
• Application controllable cloth damping and friction
• Cloth tearing simulation
• Cloth pressure simulation

Performance

• Increased Hardware cloth & fluids
• Faster sleeping objects processing
• Reduced CPU impact of sleeping objected
• New friction simulation
• Narrow phase optimizations