I just downloaded the Nurien demo from nvidia, you can find it here, more information here. The demo is basically shows some girls walking on a runway, while showing what Physx can do with their hair and clothes. Well, basically, it makes them (the hair and clothes) act more believable.

There is a catch, though. Back in the beginning of its popularity, we need a separate card to calculate physics. The only card capable of doing that was the Ageia Physx card. Now, though, Nvidia took over the fun by making Physx accesible using only nvidia cards, specifically the CUDA-capable one. My 8600GT is on the list, so I downloaded the demo and gave it a try.

 

This is the first girl on the demo. Like I said, this demo showcases what Physx can do with clothing and hair.

 

See?

 

Now, my 8600GT is already crawling helplessly with one girl on screen. And now there are three of them.

 

This is what my humble 8600GT managed. Remember, this card is still reasonably stronger than what most people are using, yet it was humiliated with this game. Granted, I was using the 175.16 driver, instead of CUDA-enabled one, so I’ll try with one of those later.

 Here’s a quote about Nurien:

Nurien is a new category of social networking service where we can give our users more powerful ways to express their identities by enabling them to create their own unique avatars, fashions, 3D objects, legacy media (such as photo, video, and text) and share them with the world via their own 3D rooms that are accessible from a web-browser as well as our software clients. Users will use their own unique avatars to play various fun games and also partake on social applications like fashion shows, and music video contests.

Now, let me ask you a question: How many social networking fans are actually using anything better than 8600GT?

And: How many of them are girls?

Yeah, I know, it’s sad.

UPDATE: I installed nvidia’s 177.89 beta drivers. With this, I managed to get around 10% improvement in nurien demo in software physx mode. Using Geforce Physx, I got 50% improvements, but with a lot of weird texture glitches. I’m pretty sure the problem lies in CUDA implementation. I still think this is a nice development over the old 175.16 drivers.