Method

As mentioned above, there is no really great way to test the benefits of this card. This is due to the lack of being able to test an identical set of physics calculations with and without the ASUS PhysX P1 card installed. Hopefully in the near future we will see more of the in-development titles released, and some of them might include a proper way to attain some performance numbers (note to developers: pretty please?).

Also due to the less than impressive software support for the card, we will only be testing performance on one game, GRAW. Our reasoning for this is that of the games that currently support the PhysX processor, GRAW is far and away the most mainstream and likely to be played by hardcore gamers such as those currently reading this article. This is not to say that there will never be a game that supports the PhysX processor that will be any bigger than GRAW, indeed this is not the case at all. A quick visit to the AGEIA site reveals a list of games that will support the technology, but are currently in development. There are quite a few games on that list that impressed us from early screenshots and demos, most noticeably Joint Task Force and, of course, Unreal Tournament 2007.


(Click to enlarge)
Our custom test method for GRAW consisted of the most easily-repeatable complex physics interaction we could think of. In the game, you are dropped from an airplane into the heart of Mexico City, and your first task is to rendezvous with your team of soldiers (Ghosts). The first soldier you should meet with is named Kirkland. Near Kirkland there is a building that has two pallets of boxes in front of it by a loading ramp. What’s that? Boxes you say? Yes indeed, a whole bunch of undisturbed, identically shaped, and ready to be messed with boxes. What better place to throw a grenade? This is exactly what we did. We threw three grenades into these boxes and recorded the frame rates we achieved when doing so. We repeated this process as consistently as possible for the duration of 10 tests. This process was carried out with and without the PhysX processor, to gain a real idea of the performance differences. This process will be shown visually in the following section.