Here's a video clip from Tiger Direct's Tiger TV.. It includes footage of GRAW2, Unreal Tournament 3 and Warmonger.. currently the PhysX 'Triple Threat' of game content.

Over at The Inquirer, Theo Valich has a write up on the new mobile Physx processor and has revealed that both Dell and Medion will be shipping notebooks based on this chip. While the specifics of the notebooks are not available, it is a safe bet to expect the part availability on the high end gaming units which typically do not expound dramatic battery life.

During GDC a little company was showing off a very interesting technology. According to Ars Technica, Codeplay, the developer of a compiler called Sieve, has stumbled across one of the architectural secrets of the Ageia processor. Sieve is a compiler which takes single threaded code and optimizes for multithreaded cores. Currently it supports three processors - multicore x86, IBM cell, and Agieas PPU.

The author, Jon Stokes speculates that there are multiple cores sitting inside the Agiea die. It is certainly an interesting read and ties in with previous hints at porting the core to High Performance Computer applications.

Over at TheInquirer.net they have a story about Ageia going into certain Acer model computers:

"Acer will add the card to its range of Aspire E700 and E571 series desktop PCs."

This is exciting news as previously Ageia had loads of wins at the boutique / high level end but hadn't really made a dent in the large OEM market outside of a distribution deal with Dell.

Hopefully other OEM's take note and start to at minimum offer the card as an option at the system build phase.

In our earlier RoboBlitz story, we talked briefly about the Unreal 3 Engine and how the game was the first to be released based on the U3 engine.

In the past few weeks we have seen more releases based on the Unreal 3 Engine, including impressive titles such as Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas. One of the new features in the U3 Engine is ample use of physics as evidenced by Roboblitz and Gears of War. Any guesses as to which physics package is written into the U3 engine?

You guessed it - Physx. While consoles are purpose built for gaming and have the dedicated horsepower for physics calculations, desktop processors are not purpose built for gaming / physics and bottlenecks are introduced if higher level physics are introduced. Hopefully we'll see some more hardware accelerated titles in the near future - not from a framerate perspective (which should benefit regardless) but from a gameplay quality perspective.

Roboblitz, the first game available based on the Unreal 3 engine, is available today for purchase from Roboblitz.com. The game is entirely physics based which makes for some rather interesting object interactions. I am hoping to get a review of this title up in the next few days. Stay tuned.

Previously we talked about the special promotional pricing on a BFG Physx card over at Dell.com for $167. Well, that deal has come and gone and the price has jumped back up over $250. Fortunately, someone has seen fit to undercut Mr. Dell by a substantial margin extending reduced prices indefinitely.

Shentech for $171

Xtechnology for $172 Edit 10/30/06 - The price has jumped on this one over $200.

Allstarshop for $177 Edit 10/30/06 - The price has jumped on this one over $200.

As it sits it seems that the bottom two are back ordered, but it certainly is worth the attempt.

Ageia should be releasing RealityMark, a Physx benchmarking tool, for public download in the next few days. I managed to score a copy and ran it on my machine.... let me tell you the video doesn't hold a candle to the real thing. The cloth effects are astounding, along with the shockwave effects with the explosions. A couple of small nits I have with it - the benchmark basically runs through twice, once on hardware accel and once on software accel but it runs it like an old batch file - it kicks you out of the program and restarts itself. The other nit I have is with the precision of the scores - as the frame rate is recorded down to the hundredths, and under software it can easily drop to under 1 frame per second, the percentage difference between the two measurements can vary quite a bit between runs. I am interested to know what the margin of error is in the benchmark. Any comments Ageia?

Welcome to Planet Physx - a site dedicated to following all things PPU (Physics Processing Unit). I'll be throwing blog-style stories up here from time to time and covering tidbits of interesting news. Ageia, my benefactor through virtue of advertising dollars, is currently the only name in the game when it comes to PPUs although some major players are seeking to follow Ageia's lead into the dedicated physics realm. Comments are moderated as we aren't a Troll and Flame board - criticism is welcome but if it begins with j00 thanks but no thanks.