NVIDIA’s PhysX Looks to Have Bright Future

For those of you who don’t often look at the top of the page, you are missing out on some cool content. One of the most notable would be our in-depth look at NVIDIA’s PhysX technology, which is now supported right off of NVIDIA top-end GPUs, with more to be supported next month. Is it worth getting excited over? If developers begin to pick up on the technology, then yes, definitely.

The problem when AGEIA owned the rights to the technology was that they were selling the technology to be tied to an add-in card, which no one wanted to buy. With support built for a GPU, it blows the doors open for support, since everyone has one. Of course, the bigger the card, the better the capabilities, but at least the option will be there. We’ll be learning a lot more about this throughout the summer, so stay tuned as we’ll keep you up to date.

For those looking for a new tuner, you might be interested in our look at AMD’s brand-new All-In-Wonder HD card, which should be available in the weeks to come. It packs in HD 3650 performance and TV tuner functionality into the same card. Sounds great, but the proof of its value will be seen once we get one into our labs.

Lastly, you cannot miss Bill’s exhaustive look at 22 different CPU coolers, which he pit against the ultra-hot QX6850 Quad-Core processor. You might be surprised which coolers come out on top, and which fail miserably. It’s just too bad that we awarded an Editor’s Choice award to a cooler that, as it turns out, has been discontinued even before it could launch. Crazy!

PhysX is getting a lot of attention right now, but the reasons vary wildly. Since we haven’t taken a look at the technology in a while, this article’s goal is to see where things stand. We’ll also be taking an in-depth look at GPU PhysX performance, using both 3DMark Vantage and UT III.

Source:
NVIDIA’s PhysX: Performance and Status Report