NVIDIA's GeForce Power Pack 2 - GPU PhysX revisited

It may not feel like it, but it's been over three months since the release of NVIDIA's first so-called GeForce Power Pack, a launch designed to grab the headlines by showcasing the ability of NVIDIA GPUs to perform physics processing.  Since that point we still haven't seen anything absolutely show-stopping with regard to the use of PhysX on the GPU, but there have been some hints as to its potential, not lease in the recently released video showing Mirror's Edge on the PC with GPU-based PhysX enabled - It takes a lot to drop my seasoned old jaw these days, but that video did it, and I can't tell you how excited I am by the prospect of this particular title on the PC.

Away from PhysX, NVIDIA have also been making plenty of noise about their CUDA GPGPU technology (which powers PhysX on GeForce boards amongst other things), and that brings us to the launch today of the second GeForce Power Pack, bundling together some demos and applications to showcase both CUDA and PhysX for anyone with a suitable GeForce part to download, play with and enjoy.  The first Power Pack brought us some intriguing alpha versions of forthcoming PhysX titles, so what's on show this time around?  Let's take a look at the full list:

- Two new levels for Warmonger—Tombstone and Asylum
- Crazy Machines 2—Featuring GPU-accelerated NVIDIA PhysX effects
- Dark Basic Fluids Demo by Kenneth Bugeja
- Dark Basis PhysX Soft Body Demo by Kenneth Bejega
- NVIDIA PhysX Screensaver
- Power Director 7.0 Trial—with NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated video effects
- TMPGENC XPRESS 4.6.2.266 Trial—with NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated video effects

Admittedly this list may not rouse the imagination as much as the initial GeForce Power Pack, but there are still some interesting things to discuss here.  For starters, we've already examined how CUDA functionality benefits Power Director 7 in its own article, so the inclusion of CUDA-accelerated effects to TMPGENC is another step in that direction (with GPU-assisted video transcoding on its way for the former application too, by the way).

That leaves us with some more PhysX related investigation and discussion, and to be honest it couldn't be a better time to re-evaluate this particular functionality.  For starters, we now have a brand-spanking new Core i7 setup, which gives us a more powerful CPU to put up against any GPU-based physics acceleration.  Then there's the recent WHQL release of NVIDIA's GeForce 180 series drivers, which includes the ability to move all PhysX processing to a second discrete GPU (which doesn't need to be configured via SLI, meaning it can be used on any motherboard with two PCI Express 16x slots), leaving your primary graphics board free to perform normal 3D rendering.

With this in mind, we'll be making use of the contents of both GeForce Power Packs to check out the state of PhysX acceleration with NVIDIA's GeForce 180 series drivers, using both a GeForce GTX 260 graphics board in isolation, as well as paired with a slower (but more than capable for PhysX processing alone) GeForce 9600 GSO to run PhysX processing while the GeForce GTX 260 handles 3D rendering.  Read on to see how these combinations fare when coupled with our Intel Core i7 940 system.