Published in Graphics

Nvidia's new PhysX driver is a feature

by on01 July 2008

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Not a cheat


There has been a lot of talk about Nvidia’s soon-to-appear 177.39 driver. Nvidia is currently in beta stage with this driver and the driver is being WHQL’d as we speak.


This beta driver is the first one to bring the PhysX on Geforce GPU and this will improve at least two benchmarks, 3Dmark Vantage, a next-generation benchmark that doesn’t support next-generation DirectX 10.1 and Unreal Tournament 3.

If you use this driver and have the Geforce 8 or Geforce 9 product, including the Geforce 200 series, you will gain some performance in Vantage and Unreal tournament 3.

Some people call it cheating, but we dare to call it a feature, as the Geforce user won’t have to pay for it and it will run your games faster. We don’t understand why people are against free performance.

ATI, on the other hand, is trying to make a big deal out of it, as its pride doesn’t let it embrace Cuda and PhysX, as Nvidia’s VP told Fudzilla on the record that ATI can do it if it wants to.

So, who is the bad guy now, as all Radeon 3000 and 4000 series can support PhysX, but only when ATI decides to swallow its pride? ATI’s official line, again from its VP mouth, was that ATI supports open architectures and currently Cuda is not one of them, and the second part of the answer involves the fact that ATI just got in bed with Intel and has decided to stick with Havoc, at least for the time being.

Update: We have focused on Nvidia and what this driver support brings, rather than some flaws in the 3Dmark Vantage design and the way how the application processes PhysX. Unreal tournament 3 is a good example of how to test GPU and PhysX at the same time.

Last modified on 01 July 2008
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