Lost in arguing press releases and rhetoric spewed forth about Ageia's new PhysX PPU cards? HardOCP cuts to the chase and tells you what you really need to know about PhysX and your money.

After spending some time with PhysX cards from both BFGTech and ASUS, I have come away unimpressed with the value it delivers to the gamer. (Also, just to be clear, the ASUS retail card is 128MB, not 256MB as previously stated.) The fact of the matter is that in order to experience what a PhysX card has to offer, you need a game that truly takes advantage of it. We discussed this in our previous PhysX editorial published in March. Our point back then was that in order for the PhysX card to be successful, PhysX was going to need a "killer app" to propel it forward into the gaming community as a must-have piece of hardware. After playing GRAW and Cell Factor for hours and hours over the last week, it has become painfully obvious that there is no reason for the gamer to own a PhysX card - yet. These are hardly the only two titles that you will ever see for PhysX hardware, but they are the only two that Ageia supplied to the press in order to show off PhysX' talent. That being the case, I have to assume that these two are the best current titles to showcase PhysX.

So much hype over the past year, and so little to show for it now that the cards will start showing up. Well, physics will play a big part in gaming in the future, but whether or not PhysX will be there is another matter. It will be interesting to see how well quad core CPUs can handle physics in software, as compared to a hardware solution.

alright already!

I think we all know the deal... no point in being an early adopter with this thing. I just really like the idea so i hope the company survives until the next set of games come out and until they can release the next incarnation of thier PPU.