NVIDIA To Enable PhysX For Full Line of GPUs

MojoKid brings news from HotHardware that NVIDIA will be enabling PhysX for some of its newest graphics cards in an upcoming driver release. Support for the full GeForce 8/9 line will be added gradually. NVIDIA acquired PhysX creator AGEIA earlier this year.

Comments

Re:PhysX?

[aliquis]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX

Realtime hardware accelerated physics. Used to be on a separate expensive board which few games supported but Nvidia are implementing it on CUDA so it can run on their graphic cards instead.

Re:Works on just the one card?

[lantastik]

That's not true at all. It works in a single card configuration as well. Modern GPUs have more than enough spare parallel processing power to chug away at some physics operations. Guys are already modifying the beta drivers to test it out on their Geforce 8 cards. The OP in this thread is using a single card configuration:
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=689718

Re:Works on just the one card?

[Kazymyr]

Yes, it works on one card. I have enabled it on my 8800GT earlier today. The CUDA/PhysX layer gets time-sliced access to the card. Yes, it will drop framerates by about 10%.

OTOH if you have 2 cards, you can dedicate one to CUDA and one to rendering so there won't be a hit. The cards need to NOT be in SLI (if they're in SLI, the driver sees only one GPU, and it will time-slice it like it does with a single card). This is actually the preferred configuration.