https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT7tV_d9l3A
https://web.archive.org/web/20180325124515/http://www.physxinfo.com/wiki/Ageia_PhysX_PPU
There are a few old as the hills demonstrations that were never made to use GPU-supported versions. And I'll grant that resurrecting PPUs could still be cool "just for the lulz" of being able to say that you are offloading every[Note 1] game between 2.3.1 and 2.8.1.[Note 2] But that's it.
You shouldn't expect extra effects[Note 3] and even with the CPUs of the day you'd have been hard-pressed to justify purchasing a card on the basis of performance outside of those specific cases/levels/games designed to showcase the technology (and even this excuse was blown away once CUDA came).
Of note that nvidia's hybrid ban also affected the ageia cards. Also, it would be interesting to know what ForceDeviceType did inside their hklm registry key (disassembly shows it should accept either AG1011 or AG1021 as values).
Notes
- ↑ Or at least most? Putting aside that it's unclear how much hardware support was opt-in by default instead of explicitly opt-out (or even just how often applications looked for system libraries as opposed to sticking with the built-in ones), stuff like 3DMark06 could have a vested interest into keeping everything on the CPU.
- ↑ Hoping that late AGEIA didn't start to skimp on entire scene acceleration like nvidia (which can give you a pretty bad time if trying to force
bDisablePhysXHardwareSupport=Falsein normal games). FWIW even games were cutting corners for some reason (e.g. ME1 supposedly withNxPrimarySceneHW). - ↑ There is a causal relationship between eyecandy and hardware support in the sense that the later gives devs enough computational legroom to "add things", but it's not that these are ipso facto created by the accelerator.