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The GamePlay Experience

Before we begin with actual testing of some games I need to make it very clear to you that the PPU is not a GPU. It does not render your games faster ! I know that a lot of you are confused about this. The graphics card will still need to render everything, yet the Physics are calculated by the PPU. More physics means more objects that do weird and fantastic stuff. It will also mean that your graphics card has to render a lot more objects which in it's end can take overall performance a little down but that performance loss will greatly enhance your gaming experience though. Please bare that in mind !

There's another correlation though; the PPU can calculate physics a lot better then a CPU as it's an optimized PPU with dedicated architecture for it. If you take Pure Physics away from the CPU, it'll lessen load, can dedicate it's tasks to other processes and thus can boost the performance.

We inserted the BFG physics card in an Athlon X2 4400+ 2GB system armed with a GeFore 7800 GTX 512MB.

3DMark06  - Since Ageia is a program partner in Futuremark 3Dmark 06 we had a look at that as well, we think the Novodex engine is included into he software.. I could show you a couple of benchmarks but suffice to say the scores came out equal on all fronts. There's no way the Ageia cards is helping out this application somehow and neither does it show extre eye-candy.

SCORE

SM 2,0

SM 3,0

CPU

PPU OFF

5230

2181

2204

1660

PPU ON

5243

2181

2208

1677

Next !

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter

In Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 3, players will embody Captain Scott Mitchell as he commands the Ghosts and Special Forces allies equipped with the IWS in the quest to save the president of the United States, recover stolen nuclear codes and eliminate a vicious band of renegade soldiers hell-bent on unleashing catastrophe. The game unfolds entirely in Mexico City, where numerous, thoroughly researched and detailed environments will deliver complete immersion into the future of urban warfare.

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay. The game itself looks great, and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version. In fact, it's so detailed that if you have the upcoming Aegia physics card, you'll see sparks bouncing off objects in the environment. Even if you don't have a physics card, though, there are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer. For instance, aluminum cans litter the street, and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound, which may betray your presence to the enemy.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) is a game I like very much. As I warned you about, you can see the overall framerate went down a notch as the graphics card obviously has more to render.

So keep this in mind, you lower the framerate a little, yet you get better visual quality. This will also be the only game we fire off benchmarks on. LOW means lowest measures framerate, HIGH the highest and obviously AVER the average framerate measured in a sequence (done with FRAPS).

Instead of showing charts we should probably show you a little about this experience.

I have recorded a small video where we get to blow up stuff.

• Download - Graw 1 WMV (2.69 MB)

Notice that debris in the explosion ? That's based on Physics calculations done by the PPU.

Did you just look at the video ? Good. During my extremely stealthy moves in that video you see me blow up cars with some hand grenades. During the explosions you see rubble and debris... that's what the PPU is calculating for you.

GRAW is all about realism, and the developers knew very well that if they integrated hefty Physics that level of realism would be compromised. So although you can clearly see noticeable differences between the game with and without Physics acceleration, that difference is extremely small. If you shoot at bricks you'll see some more debris, explosions seem to be a little more intense but noting a dual-core CPU couldn't take care off. Not to blame is Ageia, but the game-developer as it would have been really interesting to see a car blown to a thousand peaces which bounces off the floor or something.