what is ageia phyxs processor?

Question

i have downloaded ghost recon from ubi-soft.com and while installing it ,i was asked to install a ageia phyxs processor,what is it,what does it do,and do i need one,im not gonna do a upgrade for a demo,or even one game
when i tried the demo,everything was black except for a little video screen on the top right of the screen
any ideas

Answer 1

It's a chip which is now available in certain graphics cards allowing for better physics (i.e. falls, crashes, shots) in certain games. I haven't got the chip but ghost recon runs superbly using ageia physxs software processing. This uses a little extra CPU power but shouldn't be noticable in the game. Having never used a GPU with an actual chip in it (hardware processing) I have nothing to compare it to, but I'm not complaining about the quality of software processing.
Make sure the latest version of ageia physxs is installed (available for free dl) and check using the configuaration program included to see how your computer handles it.

Answer 2

You should be more specific. I am not sure what you want but here see what you make of this:

Obviously you will need an Alpha machine that FreeBSD knows about. Alpha machines are NOT like PCs. There are considerable differences between the various core logic chip sets and mainboard designs. This means that a kernel needs to know the intimate details of a particular machine before it can run on it. Throwing some odd GENERIC kernel at unknown hardware is almost guaranteed to fail miserably.

For a machine even to be considered for FreeBSD use please make sure it has the SRM console firmware installed. Or at least make sure that SRM console firmware is available for the particular machine type. If FreeBSD does not currently support your machine type, there is a good chance that this will change at some point in time, assuming SRM is available. All bets are off when SRM console firmware is not available.

Machines with the ARC or AlphaBIOS console firmware were intended for WindowsNT. Some have SRM console firmware available in the system ROMs which you only have to select (via an ARC or AlphaBIOS menu). In other cases you will have to re-flash the ROMs with SRM code. Check on http://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware to see what is available for your particular system. In any case: no SRM means no FreeBSD (or NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64 Unix or OpenVMS for that matter). With the demise of WindowsNT/alpha a lot of former NT boxes are sold on the second hand market. They have little or no trade-in value when they are NT-only from the console firmware perspective. So, be suspicious if the price appears too good.

Known non-SRM machines are:

* Digital XL series
* Digital XLT series
* Samsung PC164UX
* Samsung 164B