BFG Ageia PhysX Processor Card - Retro Unboxing
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,135 words · ~5 min read
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Cooler Master nepton Series CPU coolers are available in a variety of radiator
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sizes to perfectly suit your next build click now to learn
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more so I figured what better way to do
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a video about a product that no longer exists than to bring back a format that
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no longer really exists welcome to the first retro unboxing that we have done
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in probably about a year today we have a
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BFG AIA physx processor card yeah dog
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check this thing out so game programmers can design content for the AIA processor
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where every object can smash bounce off deform or shatter any other object this
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thing's from like 2007 guys we're talking back when BFG actually still
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existed all right what else what how else do they sell this this freaking BFG
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is proud to offer true lifetime warranty free 24-hour a 7 day a week tech support
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uh good good luck to me if uh if I was going to try and go ahead and redeem any
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of that stuff right there all right this enables incredibly realistic game
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environments tens of thousands of realistic smart particles accelerated
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real-time physical motion freeze up precious in-game CPU cycles for
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additional gaming or non-gaming use they've got a list of like games
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compatible the problem is that this was probably pretty much the complete list
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of games compatible with fizx at the time so most of the newer viewers there
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while I while I go ahead head and open up the box most of the newer viewers are
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probably only really familiar with physx in the context of NVIDIA physx where
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it's a function that's built into the GPU where it uses its Cuda processing in
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order to accelerate physics calculations whether it's fluid simulation um
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particles objects bouncing off of each other or deforming realistically or
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whatever else but this for those of you who aren't familiar with it is how it
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actually all got started NVIDIA acquired AIA back in
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2008 um shortly after there was all this
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speculation that AIA was going to succeed like here if we pop up the front
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of the box here introducing the action accelerator physic by AIA so this this
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was how a Gia envisioned this whole thing we'd have the CPU to be the brain
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Intel AMD see they help us out with this they'd have the graphics Processing Unit
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the eyes NVIDIA ATI now AMD and then the
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physx processor they wanted this to be a dedicated
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device that was going to exist in every gaming PC to accelerate physics and you
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know what they actually got pretty close I mean Dell even released a notebook
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that featured a dedicated AIA mobile I think it was what was it the the 100m or
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something like that I have notes cuz I can hardly even remember any of this crap so yeah it was the physx 100m for
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laptops and they even managed to get Delta integrate that and then months
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later boom NVIDIA snapped them up
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supported the this fizx card for a little while and then eventually moved
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all that functionality onto the GPU but let's take a look at what a fiza card
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would have looked like it had no IO so
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just a just a plain blank IO Shield not even any branding on it or anything
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although that might have been nice on the front we find 128 Megs of gddr3
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memory so that's going to be based on ddr2 technology we've also got a simple
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aluminum heat sink that makes direct contact with the core held by simple
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push pins that was pretty standard in those days and then it does need
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external power so we've got a four pin Molex connector back here that they
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actually go ahead and provide a splitter so that you can reuse this connector for
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yet another device actually not a very smart way to do that the interface get
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this guys is PCI so you that probably
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tells you about how much bandwidth the card really needed and then on the back
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you can see all the connectors for that custom processor that was on there and
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uh that's pretty much it oh oh hold on better not remove that sticker kids
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because if I do my warranty will be
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invalid yeah we better watch out watch out for that so
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basically what's what's changed with physx well okay NVIDIA took it over they
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they took it under their wing um has has
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aia's goal been achieved of having physx
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sort of pervasive in games not yet I
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think probably the most discour enaging thing to me is if you check out the Wikipedia list of all the physx games
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that are Hardware accelerated because physx is actually in all kinds of games
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on the PC on even mobile where it's just
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using the technology and then using CPU acceleration but actual Hardware
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accelerated physx is is still about as
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uncommon today as it was even back in
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2008 2009 2010 when it was first getting
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off the ground and we haven't really seen a game that's into ated it very
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deeply since well really I mean cell
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factor I mean you'll you'll have things like the cape sweeping around
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realistically or you'll have things like some really interesting effects in the
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Borderland series that aren't enabled without fizx but we're really still
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waiting for that killer app that comes along and makes physics an integral part
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of the game play where you can you can really uh you know kill or deter the
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other characters with with with physics movements so um it was especially
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disappointing actually see to see the battlefield series move backwards in
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that regard with destructible environments and all that so I think
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that's pretty much it thank you for checking out uh my unboxing of the
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NVIDIA or not NVIDIA The BFG a GF fizx
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card don't forget to like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
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