Asus PhysX P1 Physics Accelerator PCI Card Review

The specifications on the Asus PhysX P1 card are identical to those on the BFG card — AGEIA has only a single product offering thus far and it makes sense the two products would be near facsimiles. 

 

 

Processor Type AGEIA™ PhysX™ Bus Technology 32-bit PCI 3.0 Memory Interface 128-bit GDDR3 Memory Capacity 128MB Memory Bandwidth 12Gbytes/sec. Memory Clock 733MHz Peak Instruction Bandwidth 20 Billion Instructions/sec Sphere-Sphere collision/sec 530 Million max Convex-Convex (Complex) collisions/sec 533,000 max Adaptor/Cable bundled Power Cable Software Bundled Asus PhysX P1 GRAW Edition: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter Cell Factor SwitchBall Demo Asus Driver Asus PhysX P1: SwitchBall demo Asus Driver Note *Specifications are subject to change without notice *PCB color and bundled software versions are subject to change without notice. *Brand and product names mentioned are trademarks of their respective companies

 

The Asus card is still using the PCI bus, not the newer PCI Express bus, as AGEIA still states the bandwidth and latency are appropriate over it for their physics computation models.  128MB of GDDR3 memory is attached to a 128-bit memory bus to store all the physical information required for AGEIA’s PPU to function.

 

 

The PhysX P1 card looks like a standard PCI add-in graphics card with a small heatsink and fan attached and a 4-pin power connection on the rear of the card.  The Asus heatsink is somewhat heavier than the one BFG chose to use, but both seem to be effective and I noticed no differences in performance of cooling during gameplay. 

 

 

The Asus P1 requires the use of a 4-pin power connection (like your hard drive uses) and it ships with an adaptor to split an existing connection into two. 

 

 

The face of the card features the AGEIA PhysX logo and no external connections as their is no input or output required for the PPU to operate.

 

 

The extras included in the box with the Asus PhysX P1 turns out to be its best feature.  Besides getting the standard installation manual, power adaptor, driver CD and demo disc, Asus has worked a deal with Ubisoft to provide the full retail Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter game in the box as well.  Since GRAW was the title game for the PhysX launch, Asus has a killer app here that nearly all PPU gamers will want.

 

 

Taking the heatsink off the card we see the AGEIA PhysX PPU in all its glory: 125 million transistors worth.