Graphic Cards PhysX Performance Update: City of Villains

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Anandtech

On the positive side, AGEIA and Cryptic have fixed many of our earlier complaints about using PhysX hardware acceleration under City of Villains. The game no longer stutters, and installing a PhysX card doesn't immediately result in a drop in performance (though this has much to do with the new way of adjusting physics settings and other optimizations Cryptic has made in how the game handles large quantities of debris).

We still believe that PPUs can influence and improve gaming, but it must be done in ways that make sense in improving gameplay, or at the very least improve things in ways not related to gameplay such that there's a clear benefit over the alternatives. City of Villains and similar games won't be able to sell the PPU (with the exceptions of wealthy die hard fans); that will have to come in the following years as games like CellFactor take root which implement the PPU in a more pervasive manner to create an undeniably more immersive experience.

If AGEIA could even promise a consistent 25% performance boost over software mode in several games, more people would be interested in the technology. The problem is, many games are completely GPU limited, so faster physics processing doesn't necessarily help. What we end up with is the classic chicken vs. egg problem: without a large installed base of PPUs, how many developers will even bother to try and take advantage of the technology, and without software that takes advantage of the technology, who will want to buy the hardware? ATI and NVIDIA are also working on trying to accelerate physics with their GPUs, and every gamer will already have that technology available. GPU-based physics calculations might not be a good solution in games that are already GPU limited, but faster processors and PPUs won't help such games either.