HW-Legends #17: Expansion Cards with "Physics-Chip" - Ageia PhysX

[@anumeon]

Ahh PhysX, making Batmans cape swirl in the Arkham games was the best part if you ask me.. :D

[@ChaitanyaShukla2503]

Even GTA-4 made great use of it, I remember while playing on Geforce GPUs all bumps in roads and small crap floating in water would react differently when same game was played on ATi GPUs.

[@Boogie_the_cat]

In Mafia, the broken window glass was amazing with PhysX

[@dvlax3l]

good times! I've tried that game again with a 6900XT but the physx effects are hardware locked for nvidia gpu :(

[@kevinerbs2778]

@@dvlax3l is cpu only on dx12.

[@dvlax3l]

@@kevinerbs2778 yeah but you can't enable some effects on AMD like volumetric fog, you need an Nvidia GPU

[@novinovic298]

I used to run HD 6850 as main card and GTS 250 as PhysX card. Worked great in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Metro 2033 and other games of that era. Fun times. I miss SLI/CROSSFIRE and having option to use dedicated card for PhysX.

[@Gamer1ba]

Those were the good times, did something similar with GTX 570 in SLI with a Quadro 600 for the physics.

[@kevinerbs2778]

Do people not understand mGPU exist? You need to try it out on newer amd cards. Its there on a an extrwmly limited amount of dx12/vulkan games it is better than old way. Try dues ex mankind divided.

[@jrherita]

Same - did a similar setup for Mafia III

[@puciohenzap891]

Ha, those were the times. I ran dual Sapphire HD6850 and a single slot 9800GT XFX inbetween for PhysX! I think I had a 920 C0, P6T SE and 3X2GB from either OCZ or Corsair. Old times!

[@novinovic298]

@@puciohenzap891 6850 was everywhere back in a day and most of them were insane overclockers often running well over 1ghz core clock. I had PowerColor version, my 2 friends had Sapphire cards(one of which was early production and unlockable to 6870 via bios flash) and i had 1 acquaintance who's ASUS Direct CU version could run 1220mhz core stable 24/7!!! I also know quite alot people who had bigger brother HD 6870 those were also insane overclockers.

[@Saturn2888]

I remember dynamic physics being such a big deal back in the day. Today, games have so many static assets and are designed to be walking simulators or "movie games". I miss the days of all these interactive elements. Made the world seem real and were a lot more fun!

[@quintrapnell3605]

I miss when all the environments were destructible. They can do realistic penetration ballistics now but you hardly see it anymore.

[@Intelwinsbigly]

mark my words, realistic physics will be the next big thing after rt is fully mastered.

[@cromfrein]

There's a new Monster Hunter game coming soon (in the World style) that might be good for you.

[@gamersplaygroundliquidm3th526]

A lot of the games still use the tech just turn on the indicator in the nvidia control panel for Physix it will tell u when games are using it and if it's running on cpu or gpu and u can switch it...

[@1tothe2the3]

My old Dell XPS M1730 had an Ageia PhysX card along with a pair of initially, 8800m GTX's in SLI which got upgraded to a pair of 9800m GTX's after the display output died. I was amazed at how quickly Nvidia rendered the add-in board basically useless as they pushed for GPGPU but that's tech I guess. Unfortunately, the laptop died a few years back but it was amazing as a XP/Vista time machine.

[@james_s60]

+1, had one of these too. Mine was 8800 with a custom firmware, slightly OC'd. Only got PhysX stable under XP though, Vista didnt like the driver

[@ChristianStout]

Honestly, those particle effects from back then still look better than the GPU-driven particle effects of today.

[@Fenrasulfr]

Man that is a blast from the past. Seeing those realtime physics demos that Ageia put out was really mindblowing to me. Especially the test games.

[@weirdodude1173]

I had one of those PhysX cards back in the day, it really did help to offload some work from the GPU in gaming. Thumbs up!

[@TheObsesedAnimeFreaks]

don't apologize for using the German drivers... it's your native language. people should be less sensitive.

[@dooffff]

Please go to bed

[@secretsanny]

as a german i can say... visit germany and you will see why we are ashamed of our country Believe me it is better then assuming

[@TheObsesedAnimeFreaks]

@@secretsanny trust me... I know how bad things are there.But atleast y'all gave athe Autobahn... Unless the messed with that too.

[@puciohenzap891]

So freakin cool to see a Tagan PSU still running, these are approaching like 20yo already!.

[@AnnaVannieuwenhuyse]

I'm amazed my 20 year old PSU still runs like a dream in my NAS. I do yearly checkups for capacitor failure, but it's fine so far.

[@mxthunder2]

Nice video. Loved this era. 2007-2009 is when most of my collection is from. Loved Physx back in the day.

[@danielturunen7237]

The performance improvement is really impressive :)

[@KomradeMikhail]

There are around ~70 games that can make use of a secondary Nvidia card for PhysX. The Batman Arkham games look iconicly amazing with acceleration. But there are also a handful of games that PhysX is only possible with the dedicated PPU card. Notably, Tom Clancy's GRAW was a big seller for Ageia, only works with the PPU.

[@thepcenthusiastchannel2300]

I remember having to hack the nVIDIA driver in order to get it to install alongside the ATi/AMD driver at the time. This gave me PhysX using an nVIDIA GTS 450 while the Graphics were on a pair of Radeon HD 5870s in Crossfire.

[@rbus]

Wow, I still have one of these. A game developer friend suggested I should have thrown it into the garbage long ago but I did spend a little bit of time trying to figure out what's actually in the card and discovered it's a multicore MIPS architecture. Around when it was introduced, there was kind of an explosion of fabless chipmakers who were offering manycore architectures, with the theory that building chips with as many cores as you can fit inside the die, each having it's own local RAM as well as a shared memory bus or mailbox architecture to move data between cores, would offer far more performance that conventional processors. And they did, but at a cost of complicated programming. The Sony/Toshiba/IBM Cell processor was one well-known examples but there were many others like Adapteva (Epiphany supercomputer on an SBC), Tilera, ClearSpeed, Ambric, Intel's Xeon Phi, etc.. Most were relatively hard to program -- assuming you could even get hold of the dev tools (many now are so obscure, finding ANY info on them is near impossible). I suspect AGEIA, instead of going the route of selling a manycore architecture in search of an application, decided to sell the application that runs on their manycore architecture. Whether the AGEIA's hardware actually could perform physics faster than the CPU is a difficult thing to measure but just my limited messing about with code examples and understanding of the architecture at the time, it likely really did perform physics much faster than CPUs at the time, and by offloading that really made games run smoother -- for a peroid. You didn't need to move a lot of data to the card (mostly bounding boxes, rarely if ever full meshes) so PCI was totally fine. It's highly unlikely that GPU implementation of PhysX completely offloaded all the work that the AGEIA card did, but an interesting question is what games still use PhysX to this day? Modern CPUs are so much more powerful and new physics simulation techniques might be more scalable to multicore & streamable environments that would not apply to PhysX as well.

[@Eremon1]

It was a great concept, it was just late in its implementation. GPU processing power not only caught up to PhysX it pretty much surpassed the dedicated PhysX cards almost immediately after they got released. Also, nice cold-cathode light on your retro PC. That was also a blast from the past. Cheers.

[@floodo1]

HW Legends never fails to make me nostalgic. Those cold cathode tubes (-8

[@NikoBased]

This is crazy, that was the exact GPU i owned. The blue PCB BFG 9800gt. For more fun facts, I bought it from an in-person Tiger Direct store in Chicago. How cool is that! I was probably 18

[@Brisleep1]

I love the nostalgia! When the card started with full fan, I immediately thought of my two EVGA GTX 480's, I'm pretty sure they started in full fan, which was incredibly loud, then when Windows was loaded, they slowed down. Possibly when the BIOS finished, I'm a 63 year old tech head, I don't remember everything, lol. They did go full fan though, I remember moving away from my PC to avoid the sonic blast. 😂 I had FX AMD video cards initially, but when I saw PhysX in action, I paid for the upgrade.

[@Argoon1981]

I was one of the early buyers of the PPU worst decision I made on my life, If I knew what I know now I wouldn't never bought it. One thing good with this thou was that it was GPU agnostic it worked with Nvidia and AMD (ATI).

[@Rose.Of.Hizaki]

Ahhhhh Tagan power supplies!!! Before corsair came along. I used to use Tagan PSUs exclusively! Not quite sure what happened to them. They were here up until the 2010s then they vanished and nobody ever questioned what happened to them. A bit like Tuniq with the Tuniq Tower that many techsites and blogs used to rave about. They were another company that also vanished overnight without making any announcements they were departing. Just here one day then nowhere the next.

[@laserak9887]

I remember these...thanks for the nostalgia!

[@Nightykk]

I got one of those laying right next to me! A BFG Ageia PhysX card, next to the BFG 7900 GTX it was once coupled with. Was honestly a pretty amazing experience - you know, for those 6-12 months it last, till the 8800 GT came out for an amazing price. Unreal Tournament 3's PhysX maps were awesome fun, and entirely unplayable without the PhysX card at the time. Not to mention Cellfactor, incredible physics fun. City of Heroes had quite a bit of random stuff floating about, with a PhysX card.

[@bdhale34]

When nVidia first released drivers for their cards and the standalone older cards they disabled the physX processing if a non nVidia GPU was installed in the system, so the drivers are very much not the same today.

[@Skop_p]

would be really cool to see a "ray tracing" dedicated chip for current day games/applications

[@Creepus_Explodus]

I'm not sure if that'd be of any help really, unless you can somehow get a very, and I do mean VERY fast interconnect between the GPU and a dedicated ray tracing unit. RT still very heavily uses the regular shader cores, as in a fully ray traced scene you still need to execute a shader on every ray hit. Hardware accelerated RT just speeds up the ray intersection process, but you still need an insane amount of raw compute power to run the shaders,which need to run regardless to know where the next ray will go. It just makes more sense to keep the RT accelerators integrated into the individual GPU cores, just due to how closely they are tied together.

[@ThomasWinders]

Still have a BFG Ageia PPU in my garage! Good old wild far west times... back then I had an ATI (yes, pre-AMD) Radeon 9800pro bios modded at 9800XT, watercooled and overclocked... I used to rock the hell out of that card!!!

[@HiltonHeslop]

I had one of these with my 7800GTX

[@theodanielwollff]

Nvidia bought them to kill the technology off. Now game physics is all in-engine CPU based. They just didn't want to have to license some tech if game companies started to really use it. Like it can be completely offloaded into CUDA now, yet no game in the last 10 years has Phyx that requires Nvidia card because it's all CPU based. Even the hair physics in witcher 3 was CPU only. Last game to have physx option was borderlands 2. Its sad because that was really cool.

[@kurthuber7639]

Nice retrospective! Now I'm waiting for the Lucid Virtu video lol

[@DrBF3000]

Hardware Physics, hardware sound... I miss the days there that new tech actually bring something new and exiting, game devs try to implement all of that in the games, and you can 100% tell the difference. Nowadays we have RT, image scaling anf frame gen.

[@aliensounddigital]

We take pshyx for granted now. Back then physx was like walking on water. Amazing tech. First seeing exploding barrels at 5 fps and seeing where the debris went. Then the effects on the surrounding area.

PhysX 😍❤ The misunderstood of computer history.

[@Heakz]

The art on that heatsink rules hahaha, its perfect level of cheesy that I love.

[@andrew1977au]

I've still got my bfg physx card with the box and all.

[@rallyscoot]

I got both asus and BFG.. PCI version and pci-e version.

[@Banzeken]

I’m have a Dell OEM Ageia PhysX card from early 2006, from a pre-built Dell system.

[@roboman2444]

The big thing to do in the late 2000s when upgrading your GPU was to use your old gpu as a dedicated PhysX card. It was kinda looking like we'd be able to do some stuff like that with dx12/vulkan... Use an older/smaller card for processing shadows, env maps, or other stuff that isn't the "main render pass", but... seems that isn't really used anymore. Even really cool that you could combine both AMD and Nvidia gpus.

[@Jwalk9000]

I had one of these exact cards, coupled with pair of crossfired 2600 XTs. The difference was noticeable at that time with the three games that it worked in.

[@cnst2657]

love this series! awesome content

[@Lord_Guy]

I picked up one of those GTX 275 Co-op recently. It now lives in my collection. Just need to get a GTX 460 2win now.

[@justinpatterson5291]

Specifically a 460? Or can it be a 480?

[@billlucas8124]

@@justinpatterson5291 the 460 2win is a special dual 460 gpu, made by evga. there is no 480 2win.

[@m8x425]

I remember both of those cards.

[@blai5e730]

I ran 2 x GTX 295's (for quad SLI) and put PhysX on the second card via the driver. Last BFG cards I owned were a pair of Geforce 7800 GTX's which I managed to lose during one of my moves (I still have 2 x XFX 7900GT's with Swiftech Apogee water blocks though).

[@FARBerserker]

So the first bechmark you ran was pretty spot on with the expected fps when you ran it the 2nd time around. The software / hardware comparision

[@VTPhantos]

I have one of those Ageia Physx cards. I picked it up just a year before Nvidia bought out the tech. Sadly when I got mine, I didn't get a box 😭 but I did use it extensively with the later Unreal Tournament games that supported it. One had a level just for showing off the Physx. Also, in some of the software for the card I got, had about I think 7 different demos, including water physics. I also did manage to get the Physx card to work with Windows 10 a couple years back on a more modern system I had powered by an Intel core 2 Quad Extreme cpu. I got some nice performance in the games that supported it back in the day, including the original Borderlands.

[@Dan-Simms]

Oh man i remember those days, i was so hyped to play around with physx in games but it didn't really come to many at the time. Then when i upgraded i went to SLI for many many years.

[@JAP917]

Brings back memories. I used a GTS460 for PhysX with my GTX580 as main GPU. Made the slag effects in Borderlands 2 pretty nice.

[@FoolShortOG]

Happy coincidence, I literally, just yesetrady, found the Physx demos on the modern Nvidia GPUs and yes the menu looks identical just with 6 demos instead of 1. Now I see this video and the demo, classic.

[@olhoTron]

I remember reading somewhere that the physx thing was never necessary and that the CPU mode was nerfed by using x87 instructions instead of SSE to make the GPU mode look better

[@pirojfmifhghek566]

Goddamn that thing's got a lotta FAT capacitors. I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing dedicated "AI" expansion cards make their way into PCs in a similar fashion. At some point the allure for developers to use AI to build meshes, textures and dialogue in real time is going to start eating into the performance of GPUs so much that it's gonna massively eat into frame generation.

[@xXDeiviDXx]

Dedicated hardware for AI is already a thing with NPUs but it's integrated into the CPU rather than being a "standalone" thing

[@emu071981]

I remember being impressed by the PhysX demo back when it was new. I was also one of the few who ran a second GPU for a brief period as a PhysX card but I honestly don't remember what GPUs I was running (this was almost 20 years ago now).

[@custume]

before that card we had PCI accelerator cards to run 3D stuff, they look the same and was made for win 95 and win 98/mile

[@M-I-K-E]

i had a 2D Grafik Card and a Voodoo 2 as 3D accelerator , now thats all in one Card and the PPU too called GPU

[@Clint450f]

Nice, I remember Lara's hair come alive running a second 8800GTX for Aegia Physx. Got close to buying a dedicated Aegia card but bought a second 8800GTX instead as things changed.

[@ravenarsenal]

Nvidia's basic sales pitch today is fundamentally the same as it was back then... adding exclusive features to the card that only they could use. And when other companies catch on to this as open source, they will again add new proprietary features.

[@Subzero0999]

Every time a build a new PC or do mods. My cat always jumps on the top. So I’m happy to see yours

[@HackoDis]

Wait whaaaa .... I never knew that i could run a Nvidia GPU just as physics card ... so cool. I have an XFX 8800GT Alpha dog (512MB) and now i know what i want to do for an old retro build. I miss old innovation like this. Thank you again for sharing this with us. I need to start finding and collecting old hardware.

[@mikek92]

I found in all the Arkham games except Knight, instead of using SLI, just use the second card as Physx in the nvidia control panel. Also works on Borderlands 2. That is, if your cards are powerful enough. Monitors were 60hz and 1080p ruled back then.😊 Edit- I also still have 2 1080tis in SLI...

[@lost4468yt]

I want you to get your hands on a PCIe card with either the PS3 CELL processor on it, or more commonly the PowerXCell 8i which was the second and last release. They came with onboard memory and a few different names (one was Mercury or something), they could essentially run an entire Linux OS on the card. Or they also had the second gen on each node for the QSPACE super computers for studying quantum physics. They also had 1GB DDR2 ECC, and a Virtex-5 FPGA controlling 7 network interfaces, then 10 symmetrical 10Gbit network transceivers that would connect the system in a toroidal network. You would have a hard time running them though. Lastly if you could find a ZEGO that would be godly. It was designed for 4K broadcast at the time. The crazy thing is that it has the CELL and the PS3's RSX, and it runs Linux. Meaning these might contain manufacturer Linux drivers for the RSX which would be decreased. Also has some other stuff like 1GB XDR ECC, 1GB DDR2, and a PCIe 4x connection (which you could add 8 GB of RAM with). That would be a dream to find. There's pictures of them, but I don't know if it ever left the factory.

[@Bboyman1150]

9:48 it’s sad we will never see any innovations like this with how strict the rules are for board partners, especially at Nvidia.

[@ariefnugraha243]

i"m sorry, hearing ppu (pee pee u) is so funny 😂

[@michaelthompson9798]

You’re not the only one ahahaha😅😂🤣

[@johnnyringo35]

Pee Pee You Pee Pee Me Do You See We should Be Three that Pee Buzz like Bee Relax By Tree Pee Pee Who? 💪😁💪

[@Saturn2888]

I have one of these. I remember using it for multiple games, and then having a second GPU (later on) just for PhysX. And now it's all on the same GPU.

[@Del_UK]

Brings back memories. Main issue was drivers, luckily driver issue are a thing of the past. (Eye-roll) It seems the saying history repeats it's self, may have some depth. The only difference being that we are using Intel ARC A310/A380 to have AV1 decoding.

[@jwdickieson]

I remember that card and pyramid box design when I was a kid and seeing it on the shelf at Walmart where I lived at

[@Markworth]

I could be wrong because there's always ways around this stuff, but if the PPU's RAM has to be addressed with all of the other RAM, then you wouldn't necessarily want the PhysX card to be loaded. AFAIK, the 4GB limit for 32-bit threads is for all addressed RAM, including the GPU.

[@GuyManley]

Reminds me of the first time I played Half Life 2 and I picked up that can. Bounced it of the combine soldier's face and ran away. Was mind blowing back in 2004.

[@doomer37]

Had a GTS 250 back in the day. It was replaced sooner than I wanted, and ran HOT as hell.

[@dwahnaslowdown8887]

I once added a second, older GPU for use as dedicated PhysX card, but by the time I did this, the main GPU was so much better at handling the PhysX, that the second card proved to be no advantage. Still, I'm reminded of my 3DFX Voodoo cards running alongside my main GPU not-do-many years before.

[@MD.20.20]

RTX would have been a lot cooler if it was implemented this way.

[@h8redflip]

Are you able to test any of the demos using a modern GPU to compare the physics capabilities from then to now? Curiosity. :D

[@TechyBen]

IIRC I had an AMD chip at the time, and there was a software hack to prevent hardware lock in. The game *would* run physics are playable rates (a bit lower than the hardware mode) even in software. It was baked in propriety fakery all along.

[@Phos9]

There was a launch argument that you could add to cell factor that would launch the game anyway even without the phyx card, and the game ran fine… but the cloth sim wasn’t there. It did reveal that the huge number of boxes didn’t really need the extra card at all even though that was more or less what they were leading the marketing with. The cloth was the actual claim to fame.

[@itsdeonlol]

These were cool!

[@sjoer]

I still have that card as well, gathering dust and corroding away in the garage :D The development tools that came with the card were quite good back then!

[@sjoer]

It was "equipped with older tech" is a bold statement, most machines only had a single PCI-Express slot and if you had two they would only work at 8x or worse! Every motherboard back then came with multiple PCI slots, because not that many years before 2006 it was very common to have PCI add-in cards... even for sound as motherboards came with AC97 type audio, which was "fine" for most people.

[@sjoer]

That driver "issue" is 100% to blame on nvidia, they purposely disallowed selecting a different GPU to sell more SLI configurations! I don't remember how we patched it, but I might still have the patches for it laying around somewhere!

[@sjoer]

The card on our side of the pond was only 150 bux, I picked it up for just under 100 due to student discount shenanigans :D

[@dienand_gaming]

Learnt about Ageia Physx from Ghost Recon. We didn’t have internet back then so I was quite surprised some years later when I built my first true gaming PC that it was now Nvidia PhysX. Anyway, I don’t recall ever playing a game that ever did anything interesting with the tech… maybe Sacred 2 or Madness Returns.

[@AluminumHaste]

A few months ago I wanted to replay some good old games with PhysX, but I have a 7900XTX, and CPU physics is still crap even on modern drivers. Games like Mirror's Edge with lots of breaking glass still slow down to single digits FPS even using the latest PhysX driver, even with a 14700k CPU. So I installed a GTX 980ti alongside and surprisingly it works without issue. I did have to install the control panel to set PhysX to run on just the GPU, then uninstalled it. Just have driver and physX driver installed. Tried Batman, Mirror's Edge, Borderlands 2 etc, they all work. At 4K highest settings, Batman Arkham City benchmark with PhysX went from 40 fps to over 200 fps.

[@Techcensorshipbot]

I remember these. they used like x87. This was so cool when it came out and it was even more legendary with games like batman arkham knight that used NV GPUs that just ran Physx.

[@Fl4mma]

Oh boy. SLI GTX 280 was just state of mind. It was so beautiful to look at... Performance wise it was good till it wasn't, but we haven't SLI cards for performance in games ofc :D

[@Hardware_Hermit]

I remember using a dedicated gpu as physic card. Cool shirt btw!

[@deltacx1059]

The idea really isn't bad, I wish the concept would have caught on more. I play a lot of physics heavy engineering games that would benefit from a hardware solution to physics. I mean modern hardware does it well but I am curious how much more performance if any could be gained by dedicated physics hardware.

[@ksolo614]

I have a BFG Ageia PhysX card in my retro Xp build. Its a cool piece of tech.

[@z3ntix]

Back in the day I ran two GTS 250 in SLi. And they where OP in SLi and could easy outperform GTX 270 for much less money. And they also overclocked really great.

[@ryan.crosby]

Really cool to see the single PCB 295 GTX used in this way, that's pretty neat. I had one of the older sandwich style 295 GTXs and often split the GPUs to run PhysX. It was usually fine since quite a few PhysX games also didn't work that well with SLI anyway. IIRC, it was two 260 GTXs sandwiched together as one card, with the heat-sink in the middle.

[@toaster_bloke9999]

2 GTX 275's together, which were just GTX 280/285's with 4 of the 32 ROP's disabled but otherwise unchanged. The GTX 260 did have the same amount of ROP's as the 275, but less shader and texture cores.

[@JayTheComputerGuy]

That build is amazing!

[@TheLukemcdaniel]

I remember when these were all teh rage.

[@siberx4]

I've actually tried out one of these cards! I used to work at a computer store and we stocked one or two of these. Took one to a LAN party once to try and drum up some business, mostly running the highly impressive (for the time) Cell Factor tech demo game (the "Realitymark" demo shown in this video comes from that game). I do still have an installer for Cell Factor if you want to mess around with it (not sure if it'll still work); no idea if it's still available for download online anywhere.

[@Carstuff111]

My first real experiences with PhysX were after Nvidia started integrating it into their GPU hardware. And I do admit, my mind was blown seeing the differences, and with no real hit to performance, likely because I had managed to get good hardware from day one. I can't remember exactly which GPU I was running, but I do remember Borderlands blowing my mind with the cloth simulation. And to think now, physics have been figured out, texturing and geometry has been figured, and lighting effects are what have become stunning in games. And, Nvidia gave us their RTX graphics cards, which while I may not personally use ray tracing in 99.9% of the games I have that use the tech, its mostly because I have a RTX 2080 Super, and most ray tracing games do not play well with it. Except Forza Horizon 5, it works perfectly at 80+ FPS, all graphics settings and ray tracing settings on Ultra, at full 2560x1440 resolution. So, now it is ray tracing and lighting effects that make my jaw drop.

[@vcbb1090]

I have the EVGA 275 Joker Co-Op too and ran into similar driver issues. I had tons of display out issues if I remember correctly after loading the driver. I think the solution to get it all working was to use VGA output instead of DVI, or digital output. So, maybe try that for your tests? I could be wrong, it's been a bit since I tested the card.

[@anasevi9456]

Fallen Leaf physx in Sacred 2 will always be my seminal F'yeah Physx moment as a kid.

[@KeoniAzuara]

the EVGA GT 295 does the same thing where the fan goes full blast, turning on the PSU. The version I have has 2 PCB sandwich together to the Heatsink in the middle.

[@DanielCardei]

Awesome review!

[@Psychx_]

Ahaha ich hab noch irgendwo ein Tagan Netzteil derselben Serie mit 1000W rumliegen. Es funktioniert sogar noch - ich verwende es, um die Pumpe beim Wakü befüllen zu betreiben.

[@876632]

remembering my GTX295 when you didn't need a mortgage for you GPU. Thanks for video

[@AlexSchendel]

I like the subtle shirt change mid-video. I Go Meow I Don't Know Who I'm

[@AlexSchendel]

I choose to believe Sheik (did I spell it right?) got absorbed into the black shirt and that's how an orange cat suddenly appeared on it.

[@fleurdewin7958]

It feels like those old Voodoo2 cards back in the day. Day and night difference.

[@kurtistharp2031]

That Tagan PSU should have come with 6 and 8 pin cables. I had the 1100 w version of that same power supply and it had all of that in a bag

[@MrGeneralScar]

Mafia II was the game I was playing, although I think that was a bit later on than this physics card. I had a GeForce 280X Black at the time (blower cooler) and decided to install my GeForce 8600 and configure it in the GPU drivers as dedicated physics, my game ran 2x faster with Physics turned on then than the single card (280X) with Physics off. I remember my mate had 2x higher powered GPUs in SLI and his game ran about 40 FPS slower than mine and lagged and I just had a cheap slow old GPU being used for Physics and it ran so good. Boat load of heat in the case from doing that though.

[@reconbbs360]

Had one of these with my old 8800GTX back when I was in High School.

[@shadowrendBTW]

I had that ageia card, alongside an nvidia 6600 LE, still remember the only game I had that really supported it at the time was Infernal lol Good times.

[@burrfoottopknot]

I recall the days of Ageia PhysX and the cost associated with them, lots of hype how it would revolutionise the gaming market.. Along came Nvidia and bought them out, you could at one stage use dual cards one ATi / AMD the other Nvidia and designate (the nvidia card) so it handled physx also iirc.

[@Fay7666]

Actually, this makes we wonder about the merit of something like an AD102 + AD107 high-end card nowadays. With a few of the features being able to run on the low-power chips much more efficiently such as RTX VSR or Voice, as well as potentially doubling as a more powerful CoPilot+ chip that doesn't require spinning up the power-hungry AD102 part. But then, unless this were some sort of a Titan (or new similar name) push, the only manufacturer I see trying some crazy stuff like that is EVGA...

[@juanbrits3002]

Makita has grown up as such a beautiful cat.

[@L1vv4n]

It's a shame that nvidia did not make hw physx an open standard once they got bored with it. If they did, we probably would have much better physics in most modern games and much better support for CPU processing in older games. Mirror's Edge on CPU is as slow as in 2008, despite the fact that modern CPUs should not have any issues handling effects from there (control, for example does much more complicated thing completely on CPU)

[@RetroBerner]

BFG had some nice product and packaging design, shame they aren't around anymore

[@aklovl1980]

this brings back memory,had one gtx 280 gigabyte pluss one older card,dont remember the name,but it was used as physicscard in my pc,😁,fun times

[@Penfolduk001]

It's funny how things have changed. I was thinking how big the heatsink was for the time. Then Roman comments on how tiny it was...