I've recently downloaded Warmonger Gold edition, which is a brand new free game that is pretty sweet and has a fully destructable enviornment, the only problem is that its recommended you have an AGEIA physX card to run. I've got a pretty nice system that meets all the specs no problem, except it is noticably choppy without the physx card. Should i purchase this PhysX card, will it make it run smoothy, or is this just ONE game that uses it trying to convince me to buy a physx card?

"or is this just ONE game that uses it trying to convince me to buy a physx card?" Exactly. And testing has shown that games that don't use the Physx card will actually take a performance hit while the card is installed.

"PhysX Processor and high system requirements Warmonger requires an Aegia PhysX processor (PPU) and some rockin' hardware to play. Without a processor, currently selling for ~$150 US, the frame rate on even a good system will be low, perhaps unplayable. Out in the next few weeks, NetDevil states: “We don't want to be tied to minimum specifications.” Clearly, they realized that the only way to entice people to pick up a PhysX processor to play this game is to offer this game for free. The term game here should probably be replaced by the words "mini"-game given the limited number of levels offered. Look at Warmonger as a technology demonstrator. The business model is undoubtedly to boost the numbers of PhysX cards in the general gaming population. This is the "every-one wins" scenario: Aegia pump out scads of PPU's, prompted by offering Warmonger for free, players get a free game, and Net Devil then sells their "full version" Warmonger game for real money to those same players now thirsty for more destruction." IMHO, not everyone is a winner on this one ... LOL

haha word, but jam, can you link me to the articles were the performance with the Ageia card is lowered? id like to read up on that

What I've gotten out of several articles that I read regarding the PhysX card is that if you have a dual core CPU, the 2nd core can handle the physics, so the PhysX card is really unnecessary. Here's one article that mentions performance decreases when running the card: "Whether on a low resolution with a fast CPU or a high resolution with a slow CPU, the PhysX hardware gives us low average framerates, very low minimum instantaneous framerates, and adds a bit of stutter to the movement of the game. Unlike the Ghost Recon test we showed last week, playing the game with the PhysX card feels much less satisfying. Multiple frames seem to take a long time to render (rather than just one or two) giving movement a choppy feel to it." http://www.anandtech.com/printartic... This is from a discussion in another forum: "Most of the reviews I've read indicate that when you turn on the extra physics in games you get a noticeable performance hit. To me that is disappointing since the whole purpose of the card was to add more realistic physics to games without a performance [hit] as the card would provide more processing power to avoid such a hit. I have to say I'm unimpressed." http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic913...

Here's an interesting comment: "I hope the mod community completely IGNORES AEGEIA physics and does nothing with it. My graphics card does just fine without having to download and install some BS physics driver for just that. It's worthless and unneccessary crap that doesn't need to be on my computer so I hope it dies the death it deserves." Just go to google & enter "Physx performance hit"...you'll find a wealth of info.

"regarding the PhysX card is that if you have a dual core CPU, the 2nd core can handle the physics, so the PhysX card is really unnecessary." im not saying your wrong, but then how come if i have a quad core its not running it smoothly?