We got a lot of responses to our inquiry about the AGEIA card last week, but just about all those responses said just three things:
1) Pay $200-$300 for it? Well, the more positive reactions went like this:
The less positive reactions were more like this:
Forget about it at the initial price, PhysX.
2) Charge $50-100, maybe a bit more for it and get some real game support for it? Then enough people will start biting, but not until then, and even then, the attitude towards the product isn’t quite this . . .
nor this . . .
or this 
but more like this:
and 
and those are the people willing to buy it (if they have to).
3) There’s a sizable chunk of the audience who aren’t going to bite no matter what the price is. Their attitude? Well, this pretty much summarizes it:
A Few Quotes:
“Anywhere from explosions to have physically interacating particles…
we are also looking at fluid effects to see where we can use those,
gee, blood spurts sound like they might be a good candidate! Alot of
other special effects like that, where they don’t affect the core
gameplay”
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=70056
so you shell out on a $200 add-on card and end up with an unaltered
gameplay experience… niiiiiiiiiiiiiceeeeee.where do I sign up? :-/
My guess is that when this thing does take off they will probably have it somewhere on the motherboard by then, and we will not need the cards but somebody has to pay for the R&D, so for now I am totally happy the way my games look on my last expensive SLI setup, hell they look awesome on my sons 9600XT and he beats me everytime.
All I can say is there is no way I buying one just to see a bunch of dust bunnies float around in my games. I still look for the best bang for my buck. I can still kill people in games without flying mail boxes.
The Ageia card is only worth about $75 to me. Does it make the
characters
fall differently when they jump? Do they dodge and weave away from fire
better? Will it allow me to see in infrared or ultraviolet ingame like
the
Predator so that I can stalk my opponents? No, No, and (sadly) No. The
card
does make extra onscreen garbage, debris, and greebles.
I am thinking that the PCI bus just can’t handle the load of the AGEIA
card. From what I can tell, probably the only way to speed up the AGEIA
card would be to have it on at least a 1x PCI-Express slot. Even then,
I am not sure that there would be enough bandwidth for the AGEIA card
although it would help immensely.
To get the full potential of the AGEIA card, it may need to be on a 4x,
8x, or maybe even a 16x PCI Express slot. It certainly would be
interesting to see what the result would be if it was moved to a PCI
Express configuration.
Personally, I won’t be buying this card but willing to spend $100-$150 on a later version if things catches on with killer apps requiring it. I think this is just another idea for them to take our money because they really could do all this physics computation sh-t on the dualcore they’ve sold us or the quadcore they’re going to sell us.
I love the concept and if it takes some of the load off the CPU/GPU
then all the better. Whether or not I like it enough to spend real money on
it remains to be seen. If it turns out that a majority of games start
to incorporate its features, then I might pay up to $100-ish depending
on the perceived gain at the time. For me, at the moment it’s just
another add-on that I dont really need.
If AGEIA thinks I’ll spend more than $5 for their card, when it doesn’t enhance any of the games that I currently play, then they are out of their mind. That’s not to say that their idea does not have merit, but until it effects the games I play at a reasonable price, I’m not buying.
Do you detect the same lack of enthusiasm I do? I think this card has a steep uphill climb. I think I got an answer about how enthusiastic this audience now is about spending lots of money, too. 🙂
The best “bad attitude” comment had to be this one, though:
If you really want gaming performance, buy a good mouse. my 5 button optical set me back £50, and has led to more improvement than anything else.
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