Doc Overclock · 01-26-2009 · Category: Tech-planations

Introduction

Video cards have paradigm shifts that occur every few years or so. Dual Texturing units in a video card were one such point in its evolution. Another shift was the introduction of 32-bit color, then full-scene anti-aliasing. Where video cards really came into their own was with the introduction of Pixel and Vertex Shaders with the GeForce 3 in 1999. No longer were video cards limited by the fixed function features of the earlier video cards.

The next big shift in video cards was the introduction of the Radeon 9700 Pro and its support for Pixel Shader 2.0 in 2002. The introduction of the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro opened a wide array of features and long programmable shader programs that allowed many of the high-end features of today's video cards like HDR, realistic water, beautiful rocks. 2006 saw the release of the first video card to support DirectX 10.0 and Windows Vista the GeForce 8800GTX.

The next step in the evolution of video cards is here with the dual introduction of PhysX on GeForce video cards and Stereoscopic 3D Vision. Doc has already covered the Stereoscopic portion of this review, today I'm going to discuss a new game that fully supports PhysX and show the difference the game has with it enabled and with it disabled. I will also discuss SLI with PhysX and with a second card that is lesser in performance showing performance differences.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. PhysX Features
3. Mirror's Edge PhysX Effects
4. Performance in Mirror's Edge
5. Conclusion