Package
The ASUS PhysX P1 comes bundled with quite a good amount of software. We received the “GRAW Edition” of the card, so we got a full copy of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter along with it.


The package also includes demo CDs for a PhysX optimized game called CellFactor, and an interesting Marble Madness-esque game called Switchball. In terms of hardware, the package includes the PhysX P1 card itself, a molex power connector cable, and a lovely CD wallet.


Test System and Methods
There is something we need to make very clear before we continue with this part of the review. AGEIA’s PhysX PPU is a very young technology, and as such, support for it at this time is quite limited. There are very few games currently out that support the technology, and even fewer still that can support it or not support it. Of these games, there is only one major label that makes use of the technology: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. (Note: City of Villains also supports the PhysX processor, but only in a very specific part of the game that, due to time constraints, was not reachable for this review.)

As a result of this limited software support, it is extremely difficult to effectively test the PhysX processor’s performance benefits. It gets even harder when you take into consideration that GRAW has no demo playback capability or built-in benchmarking tool. This means that in order to run benchmarks on the PhysX processor, you must devise customized testing methods. As a result, it is very unlikely that you will see similar results posted in two different reviews of the card. That said, we installed the ASUS PhysX P1 into our test bed and tried our best to get some meaningful results.

Test setup

• Case: Antec Sonata II
• Power Supply: Antec NeoHE 550W
• Motherboard: Intel Desktop Board D975XBX (Bad Axe)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, 2933MHz
• Hard Drive: Western Digital 2500KS 7200RPM, 250GB with 16MB Cache Buffer
• Video: eVGA NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT KO Superclocked (580/1580)
• Memory: 1024MB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400 (TWIN2X1024A-6400)
• Optical Drive: Lite-ON SHW160P6S05
• Cooling: Thermaltake Big Typhoon
• Audio: Creative SB Live! 24-bit
  

Added

• Physics card: ASUS PhysX P1
  

Software Configuration

• Motherboard BIOS: D975XBX Express BIOS Update (Rev. 1209, BETA)
• Operating System: Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
• Video Driver: NVIDIA ForceWare Version 91.36 WHQL Certified (August 15 release)
• Physics Driver: AGEIA PhysX version 2.5.0 (August 2 release)
• Game Version: GRAW version 1.10