General PhysX Info
Official PhysX FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
AGEIA PhysX Technology Page - New whitepaper PDF documents
AGEIA PhysX SDK Software Development Platform - PDF document
- PhysX Physics Processing Unit (PhysX Accelerator) was officially announced March 8th, 2005
- Dedicated chip designed to offload physics calculations from the CPU/GPU to the PPU
- Aimed for video/computer games and other applications
- PCI add-in card (PCI-E version expected further in the future)
- Manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)
- Chip: 125 million transistors, 182 sq mm die size, 130nm process, multi-core system (multiple independent processing elements)
- Power consumption: chip = 20 watts (peak), entire PhysX card = 28 watts
- Memory interface: 128bit GDDR3
- Internal read/write memory bandwidth: ~2Tbits/s (terabits per second)
- 200 times the physics power of a modern CPU (32000 rigid bodies,
40000 to 50000 particles)
- Chip is optimized for 32-bit floating-point math
- SDK/API: AGEIA PhysX SDK (formerly called NovodeX), multi-threaded (multi-processors/multi-core CPUs), PhysX native, PC & console support
- PhysX API/SDK supports both software and hardware modes and does not necessarily require a PPU
- PhysX SDK v2.3 was the first public version that supported the PPU and also worked as a software PPU emulation tool
- May be integrated in graphics cards or motherboards in the future
- Only 1 model at launch
- Retail add-in board manufacturers: ASUSTeK Computer & BFG Technologies
- Add-in boards expected to become available in May 2006 (waiting for content)
- Price range: 199-299USD (MSRP 299USD)
- PhysX PPU enabled OEM systems launched in March 22nd, 2006
- OEM launch partners: Alienware, Dell and Falcon Northwest
- Latest free public AGEIA PhysX SDK version: 2.3.2
- Latest AGEIA PhysX driver version: 2.40