A question. If I connect my 2, 20" monitors to my 9800gt and leave my main 30" connected to my 5970 will physx still work? The only reason I ask is, with all my monitors connected to my 5970, and I only run my games on my 30" I get big hits in performance drops. Due to my gpu running the side monitors in 2d whilst running 3d on my main monitor. So if I wanna play crysis at 2560x1600 Maxed with 2xAA and have it playable, I have to disable my side monitors.
I think in order for PhysX to work with an ATI card present, part of the solution requires you to have at least one monitor (or a dummy monitor) connected to the Nvidia GPU to keep it 'on'.
That's how I've set it up, my nvidia thinks it's controlling a second screen that doesn't exist so by that logic, actually using the second screen as an extended display with the 9800 won't make a difference.
If you don't use the mod and leave the displays extended with 257.15, is there a performance hit (or any other disadvantage) with this setup? I'm still wading through a load of forum posts about hybrid setups and this is one part I haven't been able to suss out yet!
Just got my 9800gt now. In the middle of downloading the 275.15 drivers as we speak. Will post back as soon as its setup.
I doubt it would be worth it for most games, if you have a good enough CPU. If you don't have an nVidia card or Physx card, the physics calculations will just be offloaded to your CPU, so as long as your CPU isn't already near full capacity, then it should be able to handle it without you losing frame rate. Also, you might be able to find one of the actual Physx cards for sale somewhere. They might be cheaper than getting an nVidia, and they might use less power. But I dunno for sure.
PhysX will kill a cpu - you need a GPU to handle it. I used to own a PhysX card - it was a worthless piece of crap and can't touch any GPU dedicated to PhysX.
Looks like it, batman will have physx available in the main setting menu before entering the game if it is Also while running fluid mark it will state that it's using gpu physx as opposed to CPU physx while running Was just doing some more reading there and it appears that gpu-z can be misleading in that physx may be up and running even tho it's not showing that it is. Original posts about the 257.15 said that it worked out of the box without messing about with displays but I didn't believe it as gpu-z didn't tick the box so I fiddled with the displays till gpu-z had the physx box ticked.. Hmm I'd be interested to retest this, ie, delete the second dummy display, ignore what gpu-z says and run futuremark to see if gpu physx is running. Unfortunately I won't get to my pc until tomorrow so if anyone else wants to give it a shot let me know how it turns out!
I connected my 2 x 20" monitors to the 9800gt and installed the drivers. After a reboot, I opened up gpuz which has a tick in physx on all gpu's. I then ran fluid mark, which was given me a max of 40fps - avg 36fps. So is this right and enabled properly? Cheers, Simon.
Don't know what fps you should be getting, but if fluid mark is displaying on your 30" connected to your ati card and if while it's running, it's using gpu physx then it's working across the cards. Ignoring physx, and running whatever benchmark you were using that indicated your previous performance hits with 3 monitors on the 5970, do you have a performance gain now that the 5970 is only connected to 30"? if so happy days, physx, 3 monitors and the full power of a 5970 for gaming, sweet
Yes I do have full power now. Just been playing Crysis Warhead to test it out. I can now get max 55fps min 24fps Avg 35fps @ 2560x1600 maxed with 2xAA and have the other two monitors feeding me those hungry temps from that hot running 9800gt 83C compared to my 5970 max temp with 1 hr playing 40c. I may be getting a gtx 275 to play with if all is well. I'm in the middle of waiting for Batman AA to download from Steam (only another 93% to go) Cheers.
Thanks for all the links, so what I've been reading here is that if I want to abuse the "bugged" beta drivers I should install my ATI card (5770) first and then the Nvidia one, plus which one would be better, realisically. I know the 9800GT would be better, but is it £35 worth of better? Although this is an option, the power of a 9800 but no extra power connector. And just to clarify you can use the Nvidia card to drive a secondary monitor with all the benefits? Though is it only worth it on the special GPU enhanced games, or all games that use PhysX to some degree?
pretty much sums it up! There aren't a hell of a lot if games that use it but go look at mafia 2 physx videos on YouTube for a taste of what's to come. Simon- my gtx280 that I installed the other day is also like a rice boiler between my two 5870s, in fluidmark it's hitting a nice 80 degrees and it (plus the fact that Ive xfire) is keeping my top display 5870 nice n toasty aswell.... Sigh maybe I need water cooling, as it stands i've an army of fans connected to an nzxt controller blasting air at them
Just wanted to clarify here, that Bad Company 2, Just Cause 2, Crysis and pretty much everything other than Batman: Arkham Asylum is NOT PhysX accelerated, and adding a PhysX card/GPU will have no effect on performance. These games use dedicated CPU physics and are not part of Nvidia's PhysX partnership.
