HW-Legends #17: Expansion Cards with "Physics-Chip" - Ageia PhysX
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ค. 2024
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Outro:
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:25 Hetzner (Advertising)
1:06 Physics Processing Unit
3:42 Test system
5:23 Testing the PPU
7:23 PhysX in games
8:34 PhysX via dedicated GPU
9:31 Dual PhysX GPU
11:26 The chip on the PPU
12:20 Dual GPU in testing
14:11 Summary/Conclusion
15:18 Outro - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![ความรักไม่ได้น่ากลัวขนาดนั้น (TRUST ME) - LYKN [ OFFICIAL MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9np-lAtCRpQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Ahh PhysX, making Batmans cape swirl in the Arkham games was the best part if you ask me.. :D
Even GTA-4 made great use of it, I remember while playing on Geforce GPUs all bumps in roads and small crap floating in water would react differently when same game was played on ATi GPUs.
In Mafia, the broken window glass was amazing with PhysX
good times! I've tried that game again with a 6900XT but the physx effects are hardware locked for nvidia gpu :(
@@dvlax3l is cpu only on dx12.
@@kevinerbs2778 yeah but you can't enable some effects on AMD like volumetric fog, you need an Nvidia GPU
I used to run HD 6850 as main card and GTS 250 as PhysX card. Worked great in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Metro 2033 and other games of that era. Fun times. I miss SLI/CROSSFIRE and having option to use dedicated card for PhysX.
Those were the good times, did something similar with GTX 570 in SLI with a Quadro 600 for the physics.
Do people not understand mGPU exist? You need to try it out on newer amd cards. Its there on a an extrwmly limited amount of dx12/vulkan games it is better than old way. Try dues ex mankind divided.
Same - did a similar setup for Mafia III
Ha, those were the times. I ran dual Sapphire HD6850 and a single slot 9800GT XFX inbetween for PhysX! I think I had a 920 C0, P6T SE and 3X2GB from either OCZ or Corsair. Old times!
@@puciohenzap891 6850 was everywhere back in a day and most of them were insane overclockers often running well over 1ghz core clock. I had PowerColor version, my 2 friends had Sapphire cards(one of which was early production and unlockable to 6870 via bios flash) and i had 1 acquaintance who's ASUS Direct CU version could run 1220mhz core stable 24/7!!! I also know quite alot people who had bigger brother HD 6870 those were also insane overclockers.
I remember dynamic physics being such a big deal back in the day. Today, games have so many static assets and are designed to be walking simulators or "movie games". I miss the days of all these interactive elements. Made the world seem real and were a lot more fun!
I miss when all the environments were destructible. They can do realistic penetration ballistics now but you hardly see it anymore.
My old Dell XPS M1730 had an Ageia PhysX card along with a pair of initially, 8800m GTX's in SLI which got upgraded to a pair of 9800m GTX's after the display output died. I was amazed at how quickly Nvidia rendered the add-in board basically useless as they pushed for GPGPU but that's tech I guess. Unfortunately, the laptop died a few years back but it was amazing as a XP/Vista time machine.
+1, had one of these too. Mine was 8800 with a custom firmware, slightly OC'd. Only got PhysX stable under XP though, Vista didnt like the driver
This just makes me dream of a reality where seamless UPnP enhancements are a thing.
Imagine having the ability to just add a CPU, GPU or RT module to a PC and have it add to the performance.
Like now if you could add a RT card that worked across AMD, Intel and Nvidia systems, had better than RTX 4090 RT perf and the PC just knew to use that over the weaker GPU based RT cores.
Don't you mean PnP? Isn't UPnP a network protocol for port forwarding and device discovery?
So freakin cool to see a Tagan PSU still running, these are approaching like 20yo already!.
Man that is a blast from the past. Seeing those realtime physics demos that Ageia put out was really mindblowing to me. Especially the test games.
PhysX 😍❤ The misunderstood of computer history.
I had one of those PhysX cards back in the day, it really did help to offload some work from the GPU in gaming. Thumbs up!
I've still got my bfg physx card with the box and all.
I got both asus and BFG.. PCI version and pci-e version.
I’m have a Dell OEM Ageia PhysX card from early 2006, from a pre-built Dell system.
There are around ~70 games that can make use of a secondary Nvidia card for PhysX.
The Batman Arkham games look iconicly amazing with acceleration.
But there are also a handful of games that PhysX is only possible with the dedicated PPU card.
Notably, Tom Clancy's GRAW was a big seller for Ageia, only works with the PPU.
I had one of these with my 7800GTX
The performance improvement is really impressive :)
Really cool to see the single PCB 295 GTX used in this way, that's pretty neat. I had one of the older sandwich style 295 GTXs and often split the GPUs to run PhysX. It was usually fine since quite a few PhysX games also didn't work that well with SLI anyway. IIRC, it was two 260 GTXs sandwiched together as one card, with the heat-sink in the middle.
2 GTX 275's together, which were just GTX 280/285's with 4 of the 32 ROP's disabled but otherwise unchanged.
The GTX 260 did have the same amount of ROP's as the 275, but less shader and texture cores.
I was one of the early buyers of the PPU worst decision I made on my life, If I knew what I know now I wouldn't never bought it.
One thing good with this thou was that it was GPU agnostic it worked with Nvidia and AMD (ATI).
Nice video. Loved this era. 2007-2009 is when most of my collection is from. Loved Physx back in the day.
I remember when these were all teh rage.
Ahhhhh Tagan power supplies!!! Before corsair came along. I used to use Tagan PSUs exclusively!
Not quite sure what happened to them. They were here up until the 2010s then they vanished and nobody ever questioned what happened to them. A bit like Tuniq with the Tuniq Tower that many techsites and blogs used to rave about. They were another company that also vanished overnight without making any announcements they were departing. Just here one day then nowhere the next.
i"m sorry, hearing ppu (pee pee u) is so funny 😂
You’re not the only one ahahaha😅😂🤣
Pee Pee You
Pee Pee Me
Do You See
We should Be
Three that Pee
Buzz like Bee
Relax By Tree
Pee Pee Who?
💪😁💪
I love the nostalgia! When the card started with full fan, I immediately thought of my two EVGA GTX 480's, I'm pretty sure they started in full fan, which was incredibly loud, then when Windows was loaded, they slowed down. Possibly when the BIOS finished, I'm a 63 year old tech head, I don't remember everything, lol. They did go full fan though, I remember moving away from my PC to avoid the sonic blast. 😂 I had FX AMD video cards initially, but when I saw PhysX in action, I paid for the upgrade.
I picked up one of those GTX 275 Co-op recently. It now lives in my collection. Just need to get a GTX 460 2win now.
Specifically a 460? Or can it be a 480?
@@justinpatterson5291 the 460 2win is a special dual 460 gpu, made by evga. there is no 480 2win.
I remember both of those cards.
I remember these...thanks for the nostalgia!
The moment Nvidia started beeing Ngreedia
I remember that I had two Voodoo II 12MB cards in SLI (Scan Line Interleave), I think back around the year 2000 and they only worked in games using GLIDE.
Pretty cool stuff, thanks for the video!
Wow, I still have one of these. A game developer friend suggested I should have thrown it into the garbage long ago but I did spend a little bit of time trying to figure out what's actually in the card and discovered it's a multicore MIPS architecture.
Around when it was introduced, there was kind of an explosion of fabless chipmakers who were offering manycore architectures, with the theory that building chips with as many cores as you can fit inside the die, each having it's own local RAM as well as a shared memory bus or mailbox architecture to move data between cores, would offer far more performance that conventional processors.
And they did, but at a cost of complicated programming. The Sony/Toshiba/IBM Cell processor was one well-known examples but there were many others like Adapteva (Epiphany supercomputer on an SBC), Tilera, ClearSpeed, Ambric, Intel's Xeon Phi, etc.. Most were relatively hard to program -- assuming you could even get hold of the dev tools (many now are so obscure, finding ANY info on them is near impossible).
I suspect AGEIA, instead of going the route of selling a manycore architecture in search of an application, decided to sell the application that runs on their manycore architecture. Whether the AGEIA's hardware actually could perform physics faster than the CPU is a difficult thing to measure but just my limited messing about with code examples and understanding of the architecture at the time, it likely really did perform physics much faster than CPUs at the time, and by offloading that really made games run smoother -- for a peroid.
You didn't need to move a lot of data to the card (mostly bounding boxes, rarely if ever full meshes) so PCI was totally fine. It's highly unlikely that GPU implementation of PhysX completely offloaded all the work that the AGEIA card did, but an interesting question is what games still use PhysX to this day? Modern CPUs are so much more powerful and new physics simulation techniques might be more scalable to multicore & streamable environments that would not apply to PhysX as well.
Awesome review!
HW Legends never fails to make me nostalgic. Those cold cathode tubes (-8
These were cool!
It was a great concept, it was just late in its implementation. GPU processing power not only caught up to PhysX it pretty much surpassed the dedicated PhysX cards almost immediately after they got released.
Also, nice cold-cathode light on your retro PC. That was also a blast from the past. Cheers.
would be really cool to see a "ray tracing" dedicated chip for current day games/applications
We take pshyx for granted now. Back then physx was like walking on water. Amazing tech. First seeing exploding barrels at 5 fps and seeing where the debris went. Then the effects on the surrounding area.
Still have a BFG Ageia PPU in my garage! Good old wild far west times... back then I had an ATI (yes, pre-AMD) Radeon 9800pro bios modded at 9800XT, watercooled and overclocked... I used to rock the hell out of that card!!!
I ran 2 x GTX 295's (for quad SLI) and put PhysX on the second card via the driver. Last BFG cards I owned were a pair of Geforce 7800 GTX's which I managed to lose during one of my moves (I still have 2 x XFX 7900GT's with Swiftech Apogee water blocks though).
I remember playing with old engines that worked on PhysX hardware. Very buggy, but essentially equivalent to Bullet. Getting real time playback on a ton of collision objects. Things had to be loaded in a specific order to work without crashing. First Ghost Recon AW was advertised as supporting PhysX. I remember playing with full settings enabled and being very impressed. At the time that game was as close to photo real as a military simulator got. Physics accelerators did not last. Only a single generation, before being absorbed into Nvidia.
Happy coincidence, I literally, just yesetrady, found the Physx demos on the modern Nvidia GPUs and yes the menu looks identical just with 6 demos instead of 1. Now I see this video and the demo, classic.
The art on that heatsink rules hahaha, its perfect level of cheesy that I love.
Nice retrospective! Now I'm waiting for the Lucid Virtu video lol
I once added a second, older GPU for use as dedicated PhysX card, but by the time I did this, the main GPU was so much better at handling the PhysX, that the second card proved to be no advantage. Still, I'm reminded of my 3DFX Voodoo cards running alongside my main GPU not-do-many years before.
That build is amazing!
I want you to get your hands on a PCIe card with either the PS3 CELL processor on it, or more commonly the PowerXCell 8i which was the second and last release. They came with onboard memory and a few different names (one was Mercury or something), they could essentially run an entire Linux OS on the card.
Or they also had the second gen on each node for the QSPACE super computers for studying quantum physics. They also had 1GB DDR2 ECC, and a Virtex-5 FPGA controlling 7 network interfaces, then 10 symmetrical 10Gbit network transceivers that would connect the system in a toroidal network. You would have a hard time running them though.
Lastly if you could find a ZEGO that would be godly. It was designed for 4K broadcast at the time. The crazy thing is that it has the CELL and the PS3's RSX, and it runs Linux. Meaning these might contain manufacturer Linux drivers for the RSX which would be decreased. Also has some other stuff like 1GB XDR ECC, 1GB DDR2, and a PCIe 4x connection (which you could add 8 GB of RAM with). That would be a dream to find. There's pictures of them, but I don't know if it ever left the factory.
I got one of those laying right next to me! A BFG Ageia PhysX card, next to the BFG 7900 GTX it was once coupled with.
Was honestly a pretty amazing experience - you know, for those 6-12 months it last, till the 8800 GT came out for an amazing price.
Unreal Tournament 3's PhysX maps were awesome fun, and entirely unplayable without the PhysX card at the time. Not to mention Cellfactor, incredible physics fun. City of Heroes had quite a bit of random stuff floating about, with a PhysX card.
I had one of these exact cards, coupled with pair of crossfired 2600 XTs. The difference was noticeable at that time with the three games that it worked in.
I remember that card and pyramid box design when I was a kid and seeing it on the shelf at Walmart where I lived at
Brings back memories. I used a GTS460 for PhysX with my GTX580 as main GPU. Made the slag effects in Borderlands 2 pretty nice.
I have a BFG Ageia PhysX card in my retro Xp build. Its a cool piece of tech.
Oh man i remember those days, i was so hyped to play around with physx in games but it didn't really come to many at the time. Then when i upgraded i went to SLI for many many years.
Had a GTS 250 back in the day. It was replaced sooner than I wanted, and ran HOT as hell.
I remember being impressed by the PhysX demo back when it was new. I was also one of the few who ran a second GPU for a brief period as a PhysX card but I honestly don't remember what GPUs I was running (this was almost 20 years ago now).
I have one of those Ageia Physx cards. I picked it up just a year before Nvidia bought out the tech. Sadly when I got mine, I didn't get a box 😭 but I did use it extensively with the later Unreal Tournament games that supported it. One had a level just for showing off the Physx. Also, in some of the software for the card I got, had about I think 7 different demos, including water physics. I also did manage to get the Physx card to work with Windows 10 a couple years back on a more modern system I had powered by an Intel core 2 Quad Extreme cpu. I got some nice performance in the games that supported it back in the day, including the original Borderlands.
I have one of these. I remember using it for multiple games, and then having a second GPU (later on) just for PhysX. And now it's all on the same GPU.
Goddamn that thing's got a lotta FAT capacitors.
I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing dedicated "AI" expansion cards make their way into PCs in a similar fashion. At some point the allure for developers to use AI to build meshes, textures and dialogue in real time is going to start eating into the performance of GPUs so much that it's gonna massively eat into frame generation.
Dedicated hardware for AI is already a thing with NPUs but it's integrated into the CPU rather than being a "standalone" thing
Brings back memories. Main issue was drivers, luckily driver issue are a thing of the past. (Eye-roll) It seems the saying history repeats it's self, may have some depth. The only difference being that we are using Intel ARC A310/A380 to have AV1 decoding.
Every time a build a new PC or do mods. My cat always jumps on the top. So I’m happy to see yours
pépe le pew?
The big thing to do in the late 2000s when upgrading your GPU was to use your old gpu as a dedicated PhysX card.
It was kinda looking like we'd be able to do some stuff like that with dx12/vulkan... Use an older/smaller card for processing shadows, env maps, or other stuff that isn't the "main render pass", but... seems that isn't really used anymore. Even really cool that you could combine both AMD and Nvidia gpus.
Learnt about Ageia Physx from Ghost Recon. We didn’t have internet back then so I was quite surprised some years later when I built my first true gaming PC that it was now Nvidia PhysX. Anyway, I don’t recall ever playing a game that ever did anything interesting with the tech… maybe Sacred 2 or Madness Returns.
Reminds me of the first time I played Half Life 2 and I picked up that can. Bounced it of the combine soldier's face and ran away. Was mind blowing back in 2004.
I remember using a dedicated gpu as physic card. Cool shirt btw!
There was a launch argument that you could add to cell factor that would launch the game anyway even without the phyx card, and the game ran fine… but the cloth sim wasn’t there. It did reveal that the huge number of boxes didn’t really need the extra card at all even though that was more or less what they were leading the marketing with. The cloth was the actual claim to fame.
So the first bechmark you ran was pretty spot on with the expected fps when you ran it the 2nd time around.
The software / hardware comparision
I remember when this card came out, and that within a generation or 2 of graphics card, it was integrated into the gpu.
Had one of these with my old 8800GTX back when I was in High School.
BFG had some nice product and packaging design, shame they aren't around anymore
A few months ago I wanted to replay some good old games with PhysX, but I have a 7900XTX, and CPU physics is still crap even on modern drivers.
Games like Mirror's Edge with lots of breaking glass still slow down to single digits FPS even using the latest PhysX driver, even with a 14700k CPU.
So I installed a GTX 980ti alongside and surprisingly it works without issue.
I did have to install the control panel to set PhysX to run on just the GPU, then uninstalled it.
Just have driver and physX driver installed.
Tried Batman, Mirror's Edge, Borderlands 2 etc, they all work. At 4K highest settings, Batman Arkham City benchmark with PhysX went from 40 fps to over 200 fps.
Ahh, I had one of them, it was paired with an old ATI All in Wonder Radeon card. I miss that tower, it had 7 DVD drives, I could put a whole season in the tower, and play the episodes one after another. Also, my favorite game around them was Severance: Blade of Darkness a Spanish made game that was really cool, and one of the first to feature real physics. I decapitated a skeleton I was fighting, picked up the head as I only had a sword, and threw the skull at an archer above me, and it knocked it off the ledge to it's death. All of this at the time Diablo 2 was new. Even multiplayer, but OMG the lag, even on cable.
Back in the day I ran two GTS 250 in SLi. And they where OP in SLi and could easy outperform GTX 270 for much less money. And they also overclocked really great.
before that card we had PCI accelerator cards to run 3D stuff, they look the same and was made for win 95 and win 98/mile
i had a 2D Grafik Card and a Voodoo 2 as 3D accelerator , now thats all in one Card and the PPU too called GPU
Ageia pew pew
remembering my GTX295 when you didn't need a mortgage for you GPU. Thanks for video
Are you able to test any of the demos using a modern GPU to compare the physics capabilities from then to now? Curiosity. :D
It's funny how things have changed. I was thinking how big the heatsink was for the time. Then Roman comments on how tiny it was...
Back then I'm using 9800 GTX+ (basically the same as GTS 250) as my primary GPU and 8600 GTS as my dedicated Physx card, it was awesome, but today, no one use dedicated physix card anymore since physx by CPU alone is more than enough.
The Original GTX 9800 was just a rebatched GTX 8800, GN100 !
I remember having to hack the nVIDIA driver in order to get it to install alongside the ATi/AMD driver at the time. This gave me PhysX using an nVIDIA GTS 450 while the Graphics were on a pair of Radeon HD 5870s in Crossfire.
I found in all the Arkham games except Knight, instead of using SLI, just use the second card as Physx in the nvidia control panel. Also works on Borderlands 2. That is, if your cards are powerful enough. Monitors were 60hz and 1080p ruled back then.😊
Edit- I also still have 2 1080tis in SLI...
I remember reading somewhere that the physx thing was never necessary and that the CPU mode was nerfed by using x87 instructions instead of SSE to make the GPU mode look better
Mafia II was the game I was playing, although I think that was a bit later on than this physics card. I had a GeForce 280X Black at the time (blower cooler) and decided to install my GeForce 8600 and configure it in the GPU drivers as dedicated physics, my game ran 2x faster with Physics turned on then than the single card (280X) with Physics off. I remember my mate had 2x higher powered GPUs in SLI and his game ran about 40 FPS slower than mine and lagged and I just had a cheap slow old GPU being used for Physics and it ran so good. Boat load of heat in the case from doing that though.
Oh boy. SLI GTX 280 was just state of mind. It was so beautiful to look at... Performance wise it was good till it wasn't, but we haven't SLI cards for performance in games ofc :D
My brain instantly went “pee processing unit”
Ah yes I got one of those, became one of the first Nvidia attempts to corner the market into their eco system like G sync and RTX
Except, RTX needs DX12 RT, and it's GSync is the best thing that came out from Nvidia that AMD decided to make a cheapskate version that REDUCE screen tearing, not ELIMINATE like OG Gsync (which the module).
@@AlfaPro1337 pffft I have literally thousands of games spanning the entire history of PC gaming and not a single one of them has had screen tearing using AMD's Freesync. I wish people would stop drinking the green Kool-Aid.
Back than i used a gtx 260 with my old xfx 8600 gts with 256 mg of vram. And it was a good bump in performance specialy in mafia 2 and batman games,ac black flag etc.
brings back memories. ran a 460 as a physix card alongside a radeon hd6990 back around 2011 on a amd phenom 2 x6 1090T CPU. most expensive PC i built as the case with innards was well above 4000€(just to give an idea just the 2x 256gb SSD's in it cost 800€)
I still struggle to believe you reached 4000€ when a 6990 started at 629 and a Phenom II X6 1090T started at 280 (and why would you even consider that when a 2600K ran circles around it)
@@noreng9333 AMD boards existed with at least 32 lanes of PCIe while Intel boards maxed out with barely half that. If they had any expensive addon cards, like a high-speed networking card or a lot of hard drives and an HBA for them, then they might have had both a reason to go with AMD and might have hit that price point.
Wait whaaaa .... I never knew that i could run a Nvidia GPU just as physics card ... so cool. I have an XFX 8800GT Alpha dog (512MB) and now i know what i want to do for an old retro build. I miss old innovation like this.
Thank you again for sharing this with us. I need to start finding and collecting old hardware.
the EVGA GT 295 does the same thing where the fan goes full blast, turning on the PSU. The version I have has 2 PCB sandwich together to the Heatsink in the middle.
I have on my website old bundle for these as i had one back in the day which has mostly all demos.
Playing Mafia 2 with PhysX is still extra nice. I use to run GTX 670 as main GPU and GTX 550 TI as PhysX card good times
Haha, like when CS-Source added physic and we would all join games at the LAN and sit around shooting parts out the of computers
I had that ageia card, alongside an nvidia 6600 LE, still remember the only game I had that really supported it at the time was Infernal lol Good times.
That Tagan PSU should have come with 6 and 8 pin cables. I had the 1100 w version of that same power supply and it had all of that in a bag
this brings back memory,had one gtx 280 gigabyte pluss one older card,dont remember the name,but it was used as physicscard in my pc,😁,fun times
I've actually tried out one of these cards! I used to work at a computer store and we stocked one or two of these. Took one to a LAN party once to try and drum up some business, mostly running the highly impressive (for the time) Cell Factor tech demo game (the "Realitymark" demo shown in this video comes from that game).
I do still have an installer for Cell Factor if you want to mess around with it (not sure if it'll still work); no idea if it's still available for download online anywhere.
I used to run two dual GPU AMD cards in quad crossfire with a NVidia card in Hybrid PhysX mode, but then later on I stopped using separate cards for PhysX and after the GTX 700 series also stopped using SLI and went with a single GTX 1080 Ti instead.
I recall the days of Ageia PhysX and the cost associated with them, lots of hype how it would revolutionise the gaming market.. Along came Nvidia and bought them out, you could at one stage use dual cards one ATi / AMD the other Nvidia and designate (the nvidia card) so it handled physx also iirc.
I like the subtle shirt change mid-video. I Go Meow I Don't Know Who I'm
I choose to believe Sheik (did I spell it right?) got absorbed into the black shirt and that's how an orange cat suddenly appeared on it.
oh man that 295, first card I dreamed of and could never get, then it got demolished by that 5970, sweet times
That 100% fan at start was an EVGA thing. I had a EVGA GTX760 and then later a EVGA GTX980 and both did this when i turned on the PC. Sometimes i forgot and it scared the crap out of me.
I do have GTX 275 Co-Op buy mark as broken for 3$ but I just clean it in my Ultrasonic cleaner for 45min, replace all the paste and thermal pad and it come back to life, but purpose to buy is to collect it broken or working but it really look like my GTX 295 Single slot version cooler.
IIRC Nvidia Hairworks was a PhysX implementation as well.
The smile on his face as he said PPU.. xD
Derbauer
Is it better to keep the case fans and CPU fans at a steady speed for gaming or to create fan curves? If creating fan curves, what speeds or percentages should I set them to?
Makita has grown up as such a beautiful cat.