BFG Tech AGEIA PhysX PPU

Value

The BFG Tech AGEIA PhysX PPU card is available from today for £217.32 inc VAT, and is in stock at both OCUK , eBuyer and Scan. According to BFG Tech, the etailer embargo is actually tomorrow, when you can add Play.com (at £219.99 delivered) added to that list. In the US, the RRP is $249 and according to the BFG PhysX page cards should be available from the usual suspects: NewEgg, TigerDirect, CompUSA et al. Again, the stock embargo is 6am CST on 9th May so we should see the links tomorrow.

Why the confusion? Scott Herkelman, EVP Marketing & Business Development for BFG Tech cleared things up for us: "The plan was to give people a day to read all of the reviews for our BFG Tech PhysX card, so that on opening day of E3 they could make their decision to purchase an educated one."

Seems fair enough, but is a PhysX card "good value"? Certainly with only one AAA title available for it (see below) the answer - for now - would have to be a "no".

Future Games

The important thing for AGEIA is to get as many games as possible to run on their hardware, and for those games to be demonstrably better as a result. AGEIA claim there are "over 60 developers planning to deliver well over 100 PhysX-accelerated game titles from now through 2006 and into 2007" and have published a list of PhysX-Optimised Titles. "It's almost unheard of to see a new technology category like this being supported to this extent by leading content providers," say AGEIA in its FAQ.

Maybe so, but the list of known titles is somewhat lacking. Ghost Recon is the only AAA shipping title. Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends isn't due until the end of May - we look forward to testing the PhysX optimisations in that for sure. Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport has a PhysX patch but with the greatest respect to Kylotonn Entertainment, BoS is not a AAA game. PhysX support for City of Villains will not be available until Issue 7, which is at least three weeks away we understand. And CellFactor, as innovative as it is, it a single-level demo, not a game.

Moving forward, clearly Unreal Tournament 2007 could be THE decisive game - if PhysX is well integrated then we could see hordes of gamers buy PPU cards. Unfortunately for AGEIA and BFG Tech, the game is not scheduled for release until Q4 2006. We expect Unreal Engine 3.0 to be heavily licensed to other developers so the fact that PhysX support is in there from the start could mean a big year in 2007 as new titles come through.

PhysX was also announced by Phil Harrison at GDC as being used on PlayStation 3, so potentially future ports of PS3 games to PC will support PPU cards.

Final Thoughts...

It's all very positive for the future but it is hard to recommend that anyone rush out to buy a PhysX card today. If you have a high-end gaming system, the most you're going to gain is some extra eye-candy in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for your US$250 / £220 investment. Future titles may come but it is hard to know how soon and what tangible benefits a PhysX card will bring.

Which brings us back to 1997 and the just released PowerVR 3D card. It had the potential. It had the handful of launch titles - Ultim@te Race amongst them - that were enough to convince some, including yours truly, to part with cash up front. Ultimately, the lack of software support and the aggressive adoption of 3DFX's Glide API killed PowerVR.

Will PhysX suffer the same fate? AGEIA will be fighting fires on multiple fronts as it attempts to cement it's place in the market. Rivals Havok are working with NVIDIA to accelerate physics on GPUs. It will work on ATI cards too, though it is still early days. The other aggressors will be CPU manufacturers: both AMD and Intel already have dual-core processors and quad-core is on their radar screens. What else would you do with four-processors-in-one than use one or more for physics calculations? After all, PlayStation 3 has seven such SPEs...

We will be adding PhysX testing to our future games reviews, where supported, and we will bring you regular news on new killer titles announced with PhysX support, starting this week with E3.