9800M GTX and Physx

The 9800M GTX supposedly has support for Physx. Does this automatically get enabled? or are there additional drivers you need to be able to use it?

Is it even worth it for games that support it? I know very little of Physx but it sounds interesting.

 

As interesting as it sounds. I don't think you'll notice much, if any real improvement. It's mostly good for gaming, but most games don't support it yet. A year or 2 down the road maybe, but for now it's just a shiny gimmick.

 

I Love shiny gimmicks

 

PhysX will be enabled by default. The PhysX API will have to be installed first, however. It should come on your drivers CD when that comes, if not, its available on nVidias site.

All Geforce 8x cards and later will support PhysX. However, the performance benifits will only be seen by cards with an ample amount of shader processors. The 9800M GTX is superior to any other mobile platform because of its 112 shaders, however utilizing these shaders will consume processing power that could have been used for graphics.

Games designed for PhysX should all run flawlessly. The only game that will stutter on the 9800M GTX right now is Crysis, but since it was not built to utilize Agea's technology, there will be no difference there. Games that are already running at a good framerate will see the best difference. For example, UT3 will utilize the shaders to create amazing explosion and destruction effects. While this does use GPU processing power, it offloads the Physics from the CPU, thus returning a small portion of framerate, and in some cases, will actually cause the game to run faster with the increased effects.

I have yet to see it though. As soon as I get my system, I'll be testing it out.

For reference, the original PhysX processor has 12 shaders and used 128MB of ram. So with it on, its like running a game with the 9800M GT, which has 96 SPUs. Only now we'd be running it at 768MB with no physics running through the cpu.

Cool Stuff.

 

Removed strange double post.

 

Excellent info. Thanks. I am gonna try and give it a whirl. Not expecting much, but I just want to play around a little.

 

Let the rest of us know how you get it to work...there has been some discussion of this here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=294103.