It looks like I was pretty much right on target a few months ago when I questioned the importance of the PhysX cards and told everyone to wait a good while before buying one. The first sign that things were not so good was the AnandTech review of the BFG PhysX card in which the card actually hurt performance.
Now there is even more reason to doubt the importance of the PhysX cards. Many of you probably remember the Cell Factor game video shown to demonstrate the power of the PhysX card. The demo impressed just about everyone who watched it. But as it turns out, you don’t actually need a PhysX card to run the demo. My previous prediction that the demo would run fine on a dual core system turned out to be right. In fact, it runs pretty good on my own rig.
Looking at those benchmarks, I think it’s pretty clear that in its current form, the PhysX card is pretty much useless. I wish I could say that it has a bright future ahead of it, but things are not looking so good. With the recent glimpses at GPU-accelerated physics, it raises doubts about Ageia in both the long and short run.