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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

This just makes me dream of a reality where seamless UPnP enhancements are a thing. Imagine having the ability to just add a CPU, GPU or RT module to a PC and have it add to the performance. Like now if you could add a RT card that worked across AMD, Intel and Nvidia systems, had better than RTX 4090 RT perf and the PC just knew to use that over the weaker GPU based RT cores.

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

The moment Nvidia started beeing Ngreedia

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

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!

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.

PhysX 😍❤ The misunderstood of computer history.

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.

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

The performance improvement is really impressive :)

I had one of these with my 7800GTX

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

I remember when these were all teh rage.

I remember that I had two Voodoo II 12MB cards in SLI (Scan Line Interleave), I think back around the year 2000 and they only worked in games using GLIDE. Pretty cool stuff, thanks for the video!

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.

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.

I remember these...thanks for the nostalgia!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!!!

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

I remember playing with old engines that worked on PhysX hardware. Very buggy, but essentially equivalent to Bullet. Getting real time playback on a ton of collision objects. Things had to be loaded in a specific order to work without crashing. First Ghost Recon AW was advertised as supporting PhysX. I remember playing with full settings enabled and being very impressed. At the time that game was as close to photo real as a military simulator got. Physics accelerators did not last. Only a single generation, before being absorbed into Nvidia.

That build is amazing!

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.

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

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.

Awesome review!

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

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

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.

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

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.

Ahh, I had one of them, it was paired with an old ATI All in Wonder Radeon card. I miss that tower, it had 7 DVD drives, I could put a whole season in the tower, and play the episodes one after another. Also, my favorite game around them was Severance: Blade of Darkness a Spanish made game that was really cool, and one of the first to feature real physics. I decapitated a skeleton I was fighting, picked up the head as I only had a sword, and threw the skull at an archer above me, and it knocked it off the ledge to it's death. All of this at the time Diablo 2 was new. Even multiplayer, but OMG the lag, even on cable.

These were cool!

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Haha, like when CS-Source added physic and we would all join games at the LAN and sit around shooting parts out the of computers

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.

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

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

Makita has grown up as such a beautiful cat.

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.

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...

I remember when this card came out, and that within a generation or 2 of graphics card, it was integrated into the gpu.

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.

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.

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

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

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

That 100% fan at start was an EVGA thing. I had a EVGA GTX760 and then later a EVGA GTX980 and both did this when i turned on the PC. Sometimes i forgot and it scared the crap out of me.

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.

pépe le pew?

Back then I'm using 9800 GTX+ (basically the same as GTS 250) as my primary GPU and 8600 GTS as my dedicated Physx card, it was awesome, but today, no one use dedicated physix card anymore since physx by CPU alone is more than enough.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Derbauer Is it better to keep the case fans and CPU fans at a steady speed for gaming or to create fan curves? If creating fan curves, what speeds or percentages should I set them to?

Playing Mafia 2 with PhysX is still extra nice. I use to run GTX 670 as main GPU and GTX 550 TI as PhysX card good times

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

oh man that 295, first card I dreamed of and could never get, then it got demolished by that 5970, sweet times

The good old times ! When everything was an expansion card :D

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.

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.

I see I am not the only one who forgets to plug the power of stuff in his PC

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

130nm is 220nm smaller than Russia's most advanced current lithographic process.