Ageia PhysX PPU
From PhysX Wiki
Ageia PhysX PPU (Ageia PhysX, Physics Processor Unit, PhysX processor) - dedicated microprocessor (PhysX chip) designed to perform physics calculations, located on expansion card for PCI and PCI-e slots. Developed by Ageia company, shipping has started in May 2006.
Ageia PhysX cards were capable of running physics simulation (through PhysX SDK physics middleware) in hardware mode, reducing load on CPU or providing more performance. However, specially designed applications and games were required to see notable effects from Ageia PPU usage.
In 2008, as Ageia was aquired by NVIDIA, hardware engineering group was shut down. PhysX cards are not manufactured anymore, they are not supported by recent PhysX drivers and PhysX SDK 2.8.3/2.8.4 (and games build on those SDKs).
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Specifications
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- Multi-core MIPS architecture
- RISC PPU Control Engine (PCE) central core + Vector Processing Engines (VPE)
- 125 million transistors
- 182 mm2 die size
- Fabrication Process: 130 nm (TSMC)
- Sphere collision tests: 530 million per second (maximum capability)
- Convex collision tests: 530,000 per second (maximum capability)
- Peak instruction bandwidth: 20 billion per second
- Internal memory bandwidth: 2 Tb/sec
- Peak power consumption: 30 W (entire card)
Capabilities
Ageia PhysX cards are capable of running whole PhysX SDK scene in hardware (while NVIDIA GPUs support hardware acceleration only of certain features - cloth, fluids and softbody), thus offloading calculations from CPU.
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Such ability makes PPUs usefull even in common PhysX SDK based games without additional hardware affects (CPU PhysX games), but performance boost will be nominal. Games specially optimized for PPUs are required to see actual advantage.
In addition, PPUs were good at particles and cloth physics simulation, outperforming fastest CPUs at the time.
PhysX cards
Ageia PhysX cards were available in several variants from following manufacturers:
ASUS PhysX P1
PCI-E version was available only for OEM |
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BFG PhysX
PCI-E version was available only for OEM |
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ELSA Phynite X100
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DELL E1
Special mobile version of Ageia PhysX card, released only as part of DELL XPS M1730 Laptops |
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Games with PhysX PPU support
16 games, augmented with PPU optimizations and supplementary physics effects, were released during life cycle of Ageia PhysX cards. Most remarkable of them are:
- Cellfactor: Combat Training
- Cellfactor: Revolution
- Ghost Recon Advanced Warfigter
- Ghost Recond Advanced Warfighter 2
- Warmonger
- Unreal Tournament 3 (PhysX Mod pack)
- Infernal
- Stoked Rider: Alaska Alien
- Switchball
Full list of games with PPU PhysX support
Ageia PPU in current PhysX reality
It is not recommended to use Ageia PhysX PPUs in any modern systems - they are not supported by recent GPU/CPU PhysX games and have insufficient performance, compared even to low-end NVIDIA GPUs. Not to mention problems with PhysX Drivers older than version 8.09.04.
However, if you're still interested in installing Ageia PhysX card (to play old PPU PhysX games, for example) into your system, you can refer to this guide, that will allow you to use Ageia PPU with latest PhysX Drivers.
Other Notes
- Ageia was developing second generation of PhysX cards (known as PPU2 or codename "Maplewood"), but final product never saw the light of day.
See also
External links
- Ageia PhysX official page - Archived
- Ageia's PhysX physics processing unit - review by TechReport
- AGEIA PhysX Physics Accelerator - review by Xbit Labs
- ASUS's AGEIA PhysX P1 Card - review by Legit Reviews
- BFG's AGEIA PhysX PPU Action Accelerator Card - review by PC Perspective
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