I love google http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/GRAPHICS-BOARD/OTHERS/Nvidia-PhysX-Driver-8-06-12.shtml
So Vantage says you do better in the CPU test with this driver. That makes sense. But what Vantage fails to tell you is that PhysX will slow down your GPU while your CPU is made idle and does next to nothing. Nvidia needs to have PhsyX scale to any available hardware; multicore CPUs, multiple GPUs, or just one CPU and one GPU. Sort of like load balancing. AMD needs to support this too, because right now they're backing Havok.
I have a Dell XPS M1730 with x9000 and 8800M GTX SLI and Ageia physx and i use 3dmax with the physx, so i can test it in real time, not some 3dmark optimized benchmark or some game...and so i will test it on crysis on cpu normal physx, on sli and non sli physx, loads of stuff i can check out, thats for the news peeps. actually, sometimes i think what if the 8800 had a physx engine built into it and not activated and it might be less gpu performance when using physx, same as the 6 series when some million transistors where not used and we knew they existed after the video accel. came on the drivers, nVidia does that alot...but i love surprises.
This type of idea will probably be apart of the DX11 spec. They're supposed to be focusing on the standardization of physics support.
Great news... cant wait to test it on my 8600GTS once its avaliable. Maybe i can get some extra candies outta UT3 or GRID
i got the driver 177.39 + PhysX drivers 8.6.012 installed on my MSI 9800GTX while the new demos coming with the drivers are not that spectacular you got to test the old PhysX Demos coming with old PhysX versions. While o'course its true that games might get a performance hit when loading physics-calcs onto the card ..... the old PhysX Demo show partially a performace Gain by 200% when Hardware mode is enabled. Especially the demos where you throw hundreds of balls onto a softbody cow, the framerates are insane when enabling hardware accelaration via 9800GTX Of course you have to desable V-Sync for OpenGL ....