Someone told me Dell either bought Alienware or is buying them. I don't know how reliable that info is, but the guy that told me is a real hardware tech head.
Yep, dell have owned alienware for some weeks now, and also, that PhysX processor was briefly available on OcUK, for about an hour or so, before it mysteriously disappeared...
Much like SLi, dual core, and any other hardware based tweaks. You need to have them programmed in to be taken advantage of (with the exclusion of Crossfire, which works no matter what).
The drivers have to be changed to allow the game to make use of SLi. So unless you learn how to write driver tweaks, or the devs code it in already, you can't use SLi on any games until nVidia add it to their list.
In short: there are some games which support a "high detail physics mode" (basically more exploding objects) but cannot run this mode without the PPU. Which means there is no way to compare what the PPU can do in comparision to a CPU or GPU. Then on top of that the PPU enabled "high detail physics mode" performance is very poor in terms of framerate, much lower than in regular CPU, low detail mode.
One might think that this means the GPU is the limiting factor but Anandtech's tests don't indicate this to be the case. In fact, looking at the benchmarks one wonders what the PPU is doing at all. What the benchmarks say is:
1) increasing the number of objects slows FPS
2) Putting in a slower CPU slows FPS even further.
So quite what we would have expected if there hadn't even been a PPU in the system in the first place. Not exactly a good technology demo.
And this is still all about eye-candy for shooters. I imagine that useful implementations for racing sims would require a lot more bus communication between CPU and PPU than fancy explosions do. I would say it's hard to see this technology being successful in the near future tbh. Or at least we need to see a game that can run full physics in both PPU and CPU modes so that we can see what the PPU can do. And a few percent more physics capability won't really cut it. Anyone remember the difference between software modes and Voodoo modes when they first came out? Now that really did blow me away.
The new thing is that it is now possible to run the same high physics mode with or without the PPU activated so the PPU's performance can be directly compared to the software mode.
The result: adding another CPU core gains more then adding the PPU.
