Still should be in tech.

Well, looks like currently, most of the PhysX games won't make use of the new drivers yet. Since they will need a game patch that make them use the physX hardware, instead of using SW to emulate it.

However, the good news is that, it looks like there is now one more reason to keep your old NV cards. At least with the G92 series, you can use the second card (even on Crossfire boards since you are not doing SLI or Crossfire) as a physX card!

Woah... stop there a minute. Did you just say that you could have a primary ATI and a secondary Nvidia card? I'm sceptical.... but i guess with the right driver it might be okay?

I doubt it very much. No way will they ever play nice with each other like that.

Nope, it works fine. Installed the beta drivers, installed the recent PhysX drivers, and it's working in Vantage, the UT3 map, Mass Effect and GRAW. Been testing it this afternoon and it works great, particularly in GRAW, where the framerate doesn't budge in the slightest no matter how much is going on. All the stuff on that list is hardware supported, so the Nvidia driver just re-routes the info meant for a dedicated card to it.

You don't need (nor can you use) a second card for Nvidia, if you already have an 8800 or above, you're ready to go,(once they release the drivers for your series) and while SLI will improve results, no one card will be dedicated to it. They already feature the architecture to use Ageia's CUDA programming language. It's ATI that requires you to use a second card when they introduce their solution to do the job, although that card can be anything as old as an X1300, apparently.

That is good news kuddles! Did you uninstall the AEGIA PhysX Drivers first?

As far as I can tell from all the people have tried it, you don't need a SLI mobo, you don't even need to have matching gfx card.

Have you noticed any differences in Mass Effect btw?

How does that even work? Without an SLI motherboard, most people aren't going to have a second PCI-E x 16 slot.

Anyways, I didn't really notice anything in Mass Effect (or nothing that I can be certain wasn't my own imagination), although I can imagine it being much more subtle, so maybe I didn't notice it in my limited playtime. I also downloaded those two free PhysX demos, Cell Factor and Warmonger. Unfortunately, I won't be trying anything else for a few days. The new power supply I bought for my 280 proved to be a lemon, so until I can my replacement delivered, I'm back to using my 8800GTX as my older power supply was only 450W.

People are experiencing very impressive results, in some cases tests have shown it does better than having an original PhysX card. While this is still just speculative, it seems to off load physics from the CPU even if the game doesn't use PhysX on certain titles. Several people reported that their framerate gets a boost in Crysis and Age of Conan if they leave the PhysX hardware enabled in them. That seems pretty suspect to me but enough people have claimed it to give it some validity.

Just a minor nitpicky correction. CUDA is Nvidia's, not Ageia's. It's a C-like language that allows you to use your GPU multiprocessors to excecute massively parallel SIMD (single instruction multiple data) code kernels. In other words, you can use your video card as a stream processor. Until recently you needed specialized hardware platforms that cost 10s of thousands of dollars. But now you can get a Gflop stream processor out of your 9k series card. Pretty exciting stuff actually.

ATI is also doing something similar. I forget what their programming environment is called though.

I think it's out now.

My question also.

My understanding is that you do not need a second card to do physics, but you can use one for better performance.

What I see happening in the future with Nvidia is their solution where all mobos have an integrated chip for the windows stuff and then an add-on card for the games. Originally during games, the integrated chip was going to be a sort of "poor mans SLI", and even a Tri-SLI if you had a "real" SLI setup, but now with CUDA why not use the integrated for physics?

Awesome. This is much much better than buying a separate physics card. I am glad they bought Agia out

Downloaded and installed the PhysX patch... definitely a very cool feature and ability for effects. I don't really have any PhysX supported games, so I gave Warmonger a try (one of the included demos... standard CTF fps type of game), and I have to say, the Phys-X aspects of the gameplay are pretty cool. Destructible environments and especially the sheets add another layer of strategy and realism into these types of games. I'm thinking about picking up a copy UTIII now...

A-list PhysX titles that I see:
Mass Effect
Gears of War
Unreal Tournament III

Mass Effect might have my interest... already have GoW on the 360, so I'm not gonna double dip there, and there's not enough UTIII players for me to want to shell out for it...