Testbed and Methods

To test ASUS PhysX P1 we assembled a standard test platform configured as follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2 x 2.60GHz, 2 x 1MB L2)
• Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200)
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2x1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• ATI Radeon X1900 XTX graphics card
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 HDD (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W PSU (ELT620AWT, 620W)
• Dell P1130/Dell P1110 monitors (21”, 1800x1440x75Hz maximum resolution)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.5
• AGEIA PhysX driver package 1.0.1.0
• AGEIA PhysX engines: 2.4.3, 2.4.9 (only in CellFactor demo)

We decided to go with Radeon X1900 XTX, because this graphics card boasts the today’s most advanced architecture among solutions with SM3.0 support. Besides, it performs at very high speed typical of contemporary high-end graphics solutions. We decided not to use any CrossFire or SLI configurations, because multi-GPU solutions are not that widely spread yet among the majority of end-users.

We used the following games and demos for our tests:

• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
• CellFactor demo
• Hangar of Doom demo
• AGEIA Control Panel Demo

Testing physics accelerators is not a trivial task. The AGEIA card itself cannot speed up the already existing content. It simply allows the developers to use new special effects in the games and significantly increase the number of objects with physical features compared with the game versions without the PhysX support. As a result, it doesn’t make much sense to compare the performance of the system with the PhysX accelerator against that of the system without it: the average performance in the second case may turn out even high while the realism and image quality overall would be lower.

Nevertheless, we performed this type of testing as well. We used Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW), since this game knows to work with PhysX card as well as without it, and a demo included with AGEIA drivers. The latter is a scene with a flying sphere that breaks the wall built of separate blocks. It can also be launched without the PhysX PPU in the system. These applications were tested in a usual manner with the help of FRAPS utility to record the average and minimal fps rates.

CellFactor and Hangar of Doom could run only with AGEIA accelerator installed. To make the best out of it we tested our systems in a different way in these applications: the results showed a performance curve throughout a certain period of time.

We have also taken a number of screenshots showing the quality of effects provided by PhysX solution. In case of GRAW game we could also compare the image quality with and without the PPU.