When running a video card to perform your physx calculations, is there a better card for the job? I'm reading about vid cards with 'more ram' and '15XX cuda cores'. If you're running a video card for physx, what should you look for?
well physX doesnt really bring that much benefit in games anymore... but if you ask me the best physX cards would be the most powerful single slot card you can get,....
No point in throwing a powerful GPU in for physx since a game using fizz-x will only use what it needs which will be a small proportion of the available GPU power. The effects maybe subtle in some cases but as with Mirror's edge they did enhance the game. The real question is whether you could get the same level of physics on a quad core cpu? I would say not at this point, yes cpu based physics can be impressive when you look at BF3 but such games use the magicians trick of prescripting the way something breaks apart. The new Kipper GPU's apparently allow unscripted breakage which should pave the way for much more impressive fizz-x in future if Nvidia can throw enough incentive at game developers to use their system (they haven't done too badly since they acquired Phys-x some years ago).
Only a few games even make physx being enabled worth while. Ironically they all start with M. Mafia II was probably the most noticeable and did fine running on single gpu though some framerate drops in few sections from it. Probably not worth having a dedicated card. Will likely be less so moving forward as more use of openCL replaces it since it can run on both nvidia and amd gpu.
Agree. Pointless because the games that do support Fizz-X won't utilise a big enough proportion of the GPU to warrant a separate card. The only time it might be worthwhile is if your GPU is very low end and you don't want to burden it at all with fizz-x.
Answering your original question... If you have something like a 460, 550ti, 560ti then you don't need a second GPU for physics, the phys-x burden will be quite small and such a GPU could handle it well on it's own. If you were to buy the latest 680 GPU with 1500 cores, you'd be waiting for fizz-x demands that just aren't there at the moment. In other words there are no fizz-x games that will use much of your GPU even if it's a much lower spec GPU. Since the latest 680 incorporates more advanced physics whereby an object can be broken apart more realistically (instead of pre-scripted breakage we get in current games), then it will be great if Nvidia push this new level of fizzics for future games. I'd love to see super-destructo fizzics that don't rely on pre-scripted break points on objects. Does BF3 have that? I don't think so but the Back to Karkand expansion has more breakage physics than the main game from what I read. So to sum up, you don't need a separate GPU even if you only have a 460 or 550 to run fizz-x games. If you bought a 680 for it's new super-destructo fizzics then that would be a gamble because the new advanced phys-x may not necessarily appear in many games. It all depends how well Nvidia promotes it to developers (bribes). I'm buying a 680 so I can run 3d glasses and maintain a good framerate. I would like to see the new physics it has take off in games but I am aware it will only be a percentage of games. DICE have never bothered with Phys-X and neither have Crytek.
Of course I was joking with that cos AMD provide good competition to drive Nvidia prices down. If we didn't have AMD then we'd pay more for our Nvidias. So AMD do actually serve a useful purpose. And I am joking. AMD make some good stuff. I have been impressed by the overclocking I found on even cheap ATI in the past.
Ouch! As a long term Nvidia user I was very interested in the ATI 7970 when it came though. 3gb and faster than 580?? 3gb was a very smart choice. Now of course we have the 680 which is even faster. I need the 3d vision though so that's one reason I have stayed Nvidia.
I did a little experiment a while ago with PhysX and these are the results I came up with on my sig rig. Note: This was just the standard Mafia 2 benchmark run. I can't remember any of the settings I used but I do remember them being consistent across the 3 runs: PhysX on my 470: 33 FPS PhysX on my CPU: 17.4 FPS PhysX on a 8800GTS: 42 FPS Of course, on a much more powerful PC the gains may be minimal to nothing but on my hunk-o-junk™, the gains were quite good and made the game much more playable without random drops. I'd have kept the 8800 in if my Antec 900 wasn't too small.
Do you remember that physic demonstrator FPS before Nvidia bought fizz-x? It was a scifi FPS written for the Aegia Phys-X card where u threw objects around using an energy glove... I wonder how that would run on today's hardware? Very well I would imagine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_ZF6hSiF9o What was that demo called? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DSAmJaLhac
I don't know why, but you always calling it fizz-x irritates me. You make good points though and clearly know your stuff, so I'm torn. Think i'll let it slide for now.
I think I want to make a physics based drink and call it Fizz-X. The bottles can be stacked in the supermarket and fall in realistic ways when pushed.
i cant find the link anymore - but a russian website did a mafia physx review - and basically anything under a 9800GT/gtx 260 for dedicated physx is useless - that was on a gtx 480 main card.
Cell Factor... runs with no effort on current hardware. It's still amusing too. Bunch of other old PhysX demos and stuff archived here.
