14 DAY TRIAL // A few weeks ago, we announced a new series of Nvidia GeForce drivers designed to bring PhysX support on the company's video cards. The Santa Clara graphics chips manufacturer demonstrated GPU-accelerated physics on 3DMark Vantage on the GeForce GTX and 9800 boards, leveraging the scores high enough to catch all the attention. Now, we learn that the company is getting ready to release a new version of the driver, a WHQL candidate.
Nvidia announced that its engineers were working on a new driver when the GeForce 177.39 version was launched. Although the initial announcement revealed that they would arrive during July, it seems that we will be able to see them at work starting with August 2008. All capable GeForce 8, 9 and GTX Nvidia graphics cards will have the PhysX support enabled with the new driver release.
Because the new driver is very likely to come with a Microsoft WHQL certificate, more features have been added. It appears that the PhysX support will be expanded to all currently available PhysX titles on the market. That means that we'll see GPU PhysX even on games like Ghost Recon 2: Advanced Warfighter, Warmonger and Cell Factor: Revolution.
The GeForce 177.39 drivers managed to make a lot of noise after their release, as the 3DMark Vantage scores were believed not to be true. Also, as Nvidia explained that the drivers work exactly as they were intended to, and as they were showed to be rewriting some Vantage files, Futuremark decided to remove all the results of PhysX supported on the GPU from its Hall of Fame. Even so, the new drivers are highly expected, mainly because they are believed to mark a new step on the GPU computing evolution.
Some also believe that the demand for PhysX supporting games will rise after the new drivers are released. Free games like Warmonger and Cell Factor are expected to be mass downloaded during August. The fact that a larger variety of cards will support them is another reason for the download leverage.