What does it take to use PhysX?

[JohnJSal]

I have an NVIDIA 9800GT graphics card, which is "PhysX ready," yet a program I used to measure the condition of my card (I can't remember the name of it) showed that PhysX was either not available or disabled. Do I need special software to use PhysX or should the card itself just "use" it?

If I need software, which I think seems to be the case, are there any problems with it? Does it cause any slowdowns when running games that don't happen to use PhysX, for example?

(All this time I just assumed I was using PhysX whenever I played a game that supported it!)

 

[linkin]

you need to enable physx in the nvidia control panel.

 

[JohnJSal]

you need to enable physx in the nvidia control panel.

Hmm, it shows "Enabled" in the Control Panel. I don't understand why that program showed that it wasn't. So does this mean that a PhysX-enabled game will use it then? I don't need anything special?

 

[joh06937]

you can run 3dmark vantage. if physx is working, your cpu score will be a lot higher than your cpu's normal score.