Anandtech has a review - benchmarks included - of a preview Ageia PhysX card from Asus. The PhysX cards should be on the market soon; the cards were scheduled to be released on May 9th, but some retailers have inventory already. The goal of the PhysX card is to act as a physics accelerator, or PPU, much like current GPU accelerate graphical effects. Initial shipments of the card will run around $299, and, at least at this point, Anandtech finds it difficult to recommend the cards. The card is run through a couple of benchmarks; the first, a test demo from Ageia, performed as expected. Scenes with the PPU enabled perform better than those without, and slower CPUs see more of a benefit from the card than faster ones. However, in the only game that currently supports the PPU acceleration, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, frames per second actually drops when the physics accelerator is enabled. To some extent, this happens because high end games will typically be GPU limited; throwing more action into the frame increases the number of objects that the GPU has to render, so while the CPU works less, the GPU will have to work more. It is definitely early in the PPU development cycle. Newer games, newer GPU, and the deployment of DirectX 10 could possibly change this picture, but increasing CPU power may sideline the technology unless PPU utilization improves. Expect PhysX cards on the market soon from Asus and BFG Technologies.

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