Considering you need a $150 card to run it, it’s not really free. I’m not talking about a fancy graphics card but rather the Ageia PhysX Processing Unit manufactured by Asus or BFG Technologies. Neither is really cheaper than the other so whatever one you buy doesn’t matter, they are the same thing but the Asus has a better heatsink/fan combo on it.

Provided your system meets the other requirements for the game you will be able to play the first two levels of the game without hardware physics acceleration but you won’t move past that point without dropping $150 for the PhysX card. I won’t lie, not many other games besides Cell Factor support hardware physics acceleration but a few do, like GRAW.

It remains to be seen if more games will support this, I think they should but it should not be a requirement for the game, if you do have it great, your graphics card and processor will be able to handle other in-game effects but a bulk of the work will have been moved over to the PhysX card.

Put simply the PhysX card handles movement of not only your character but all other game elements and the interaction with the environment, for example, if you kick a can that would be processed by the PhysX card. It may not seem like much but that’s just a simple example, in games that support it, it also calculates bullet ricochet and how items behave.

This takes a good deal of work off the CPU and GPU leaving them free to process pretty visuals and AI behavior. You will get a boost in frame rates in most games with the addition of a PhysX card to your system. Provided you have room for it, I have an 8800GTS, Creative X-Fi sound card and Wireless card in my desktop so I’m a little short on space but I’m going to make room for it and spend $150. You know what, you should too. Go buy it now. The game is free, after all.

Related:

T-Mobile: Free Wi-Fi for your PSP

160GB Sony PS3 may get 45nm Cell processor

US military buys 300 Sony PS3s to get its game on

Look what IBM’s doing with the PS3’s processor

Sony brings free PS3 with HDTV purchase offer to the US

Entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 4:52 am under PC.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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