MSTS X

[dfisher1]

I'm quite interested in seeing how a PhysX card will affect games and fps. Could you post back with your opinions and findings on the card. By the way, how much was it?

I got mine from newegg when their website had a temporary glitch so it ended up costing me approx. USD 170. Actually still waiting for it to get here, but they did sell it at that price - otherwise it's still officially going for USD 200. (I'm in the US as it is)...
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...(hope this helps disspell some of the confusion as it's my impression after following up on some 20 reviews - more will come after the actual game comes out.)

Thanks for that I will certainly have a look at those videos. The price seems quite reasonable to me, I was expecting them to be around £200, but £100 is not bad at all.

[AndiS]

Some of the rest require the PPU to function and/or overwhelm processors except for the latest dual-core affairs.

Reading that the FSX developers were surprised by the shift from even faster single core processors to dual core without frequency increases, it occurs to me that it could the same for the developers of the PPU.

In other words, if you have a single core CPU, it makes sense to delegate a certain class of calculations (the way the particles fly) to a dedicated processor - the PPU. If you lack that, the API delegates the calculation back to the CPU. In if the latter has a bored second core, it does not hurt.

I read about dual core not being exploited by various games in several places, which is plausible given that it is relatively new technology and it can give software developers quite some headache to parallelise their algorithms.

This is just my speculation, but maybe something to keep in mind when comparing all the upcoming evaluations of the PPU.

[jkxx74]

I read about dual core not being exploited by various games in several places, which is plausible given that it is relatively new technology and it can give software developers quite some headache to parallelise their algorithms.

That's exactly the impression I was left with after reading through some game benchmarks. In fact in those WoW stood out as the one game that did take advantage of the second core. (And as it relates to the topic, it's unlikely Ageia will go out of their way and delegate PPU calculations to a second core and make the PPU board unnecessary..)

So for now, it still looks like the best deal is a single faster core rather than 2 slower ones.

[adam3544]

[quote="jkxx74]
So for now, it still looks like the best deal is a single faster core rather than 2 slower ones.[/quote]

I don't know about your experience but after switching from AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 to Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 with the same video card BFG GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB, I see a big improvement in the frame rate in FSX with all sliders at about 65% to the right, which means beautiful scenery with smooth 30 FPS.

Adam

[Rhialto]

Thanks for replying. I thought you would do it under the Kuju, tell us all what you know... thread but it's ok, I'll redirect people here.