NVIDIA PhysX Driver Issues
With the latest Forceware 177.83 driver, NVIDIA has finally introduced support for physics acceleration to the owners of GeForce 8,9 and 200 series. The new driver has the physics part based on Ageia’s PhysX driver, but it looks like NVIDIA packed a few surprises with this new release.
The guys over at Fudzilla went ahead and tested the new PhysX Pack which includes the driver and several technology demos, plus the free full game Warmonger and find out that NVIDIA’s efforts to integrate physics acceleration yielded some strange results. They compared an old Ageia card with a 8800GT and noticed that the Ageia card wasn’t even able to render half the amount of fluid particles rendered by the 8800GT in one benchmark. While this sounds to be a great improvement over the old PPU, it was later revealed that the CPU usage greatly differed between the two.
When the benchmark was running, the Ageia card only used between 30 to 40 percent of the CPU, while the Geforce 8800GT CPU usage was boldly rising to 75-80 percent and at times even higher. The strange thing is that not even the pure software mode got to use as much CPU as the Geforce PhysX option, although the demo is vastly slower using the software mode, which relies purely on the CPU. Another peculiarity is presented by the fact that the software mode would produce the same amount of fluid particles as the Geforce card, no matter if the Geforce or Ageia option was ticked in the drivers.
What we have to determine now is whether NVIDIA rushed the integration of the PhysX acceleration in its cards. Does the GPU actually do all the PhysiX calculations or is it somehow offloading an important part of calculations onto the CPU? Since this is only a driver integration and there is no actual PPU in the GeFOrce cards, I’d say it could be a coding bug or it could be related to the demo benchmark itself. We’ll let NVIDIA explain, if they ever care to.
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With the latest Forceware 177.83 driver, NVIDIA has finally introduced support for physics acceleration to the owners of GeForce 8,9 and 200 series.