Dedicated PhysX card?

Technology and Gaming
#1

I did some research and I’m leaning towards no, but I want some other opinions.

My old 9600 GT/8800’s been sitting around and collecting dust (it’s only worth $20 bucks now) I have like 100 or so watts left over on my power supply. I’m thinking about replugging it back into my mobo since I have a second GPU slot and using it as a non-bridged dedicated PhysX card.

I did some research and came up with these three links:
https://physxinfo.com/news/10642/gpu-physx-in-hawken/

https://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1692250/dedicated-physx-card.html

https://www.tomshardware.com/forum/349136-33-dedicated-physx-card#.

I’m using a EVGA 660 SC and considering only like 20 games support it (4 of which I actually own and/or want to play) support it. Would this be worth my time?

Farther, what EXACTLY does this tech do?

#2

So, while we’re on this topic, can someone explain to me what’s so special about PhysX?

#3

PhysX is a physics engine that is specifically optimized to run off GPUs rather than CPUs.

The special thing about it is that since GPUs are quite a bit more complex and paralelized than current CPUs, you can pull off some neat stuff like complex fluid or particle physics without putting too much stress into the rest of the system.

PhysX can still run off the CPU but don’t expect it to run those complex physics simulations and the game at the same time with decent framerate.

Also, only nvidia cards support the GPU physics acceleration and exclusive effects, so with AMD cards you’re limited to the basic CPU physics features.

As for the original post, I say go for it, you got nothing to lose.

#4

The older card might actually bottleneck performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbww3dhzK0M

(you might get different results than those in the video, having a less powerful main card and a more powerful PhysX card)

#5

I recently bought a 780 Ti for in my new system.

#6

It is interesting but not enough games support it to be worth anything. Also, how is this better than an SLI setup?

#7

Still need to build system (I expect the parts arriving on Friday), I wonder where we can post our system?

#8

In the technology and Gaming sub forum, where ever that may be located in the vast expanse of the internets/webs/tubes

#9

Physx by itself is just a physics engine like Havok and lots of games, like Alice Madness Returns, Borderlands 2, Metro LL, etc use it. This can run on any system. The advance Physx effects are what people generally think of when people bring it up. Like others have said, they’re effects that are specially made to run off the GPU, which I suppose are better in general at this kind of stuff. It allows for things like volumetric smoke and fog, debris that doesn’t disappear, much better destruction, etc. If you’ve never played a game with heavy advanced Physx integration, like the Metro games, you really should, it’s cool as hell. In Metro LL if you toss an explosive it’ll kick up lots of volumetric smoke and the environments become much more destructible with it on.

Metro Last Light example
Alice Madness Returns example

This and SLI aren’t anything alike. The way Chickenprotector wants to set things up he’ll have an entire card going towards calculating advanced Physx while the other card does all the other rendering.

Edit: Actually according to Wikipedia, UE3 in general uses Physx as its physics engine, so any UE3 game, whether it has advanced effects or not, uses Physx. Looks like Gamebryo uses it as well.

#10

Let me rephrase. (Why)Would one card handling PhysX and another handling rendering be better than a pair Of SLI cards handling both?

#11

Well the card he’s going to be using for Physx is an old card he just has lying around. So it’s cheaper to just use that card than buy another 660. I don’t know if one would give a performance gain over the other, though I’d imagine having SLI would do that.

#12

I don’t see the point unless they optimize it for a setup like what the OP is doing. I have a MBP with a Gforce main card and an integrated intel graphics chip for low demand graphics. Being able to offload some graphics processing on to the integrated chip would be pretty sweet.

#13

You’d rather have each card dedicated to one task instead of having two differently powered cards working in sli, which would throw away the balance.

#14

It makes sense if the cards are not equal, but if they are, is it more efficient to just to SLI. an equal pair?

#15

I imagine it’d be more efficient to SLI two equal cards than it would be to use one as a dedicated PhysX card (as long as the game(s) have good support for SLI…)

#16

It would depend on what you want to use the SLI’d cards for. The PhysX puts more of a load on both cards and the CPU, where as if I were to enable a dedicated GPU for it, it would put less stress on my system entire system.

However, I don’t want to spend around $200 or so USD to get a second card.

That said, this would be an efficient setup for what Kairouseki had pointed out. Mind you my older card doesn’t support the tech (damn), but it’s worth the discussion.

Say if I were to have 3 GPU slots in my machine, 2 are SLI’d one is a dedicated PhysX card. Theoretically I have these 3 GPUs: 2 660s, and a 640 or some equivalent that’s a lower tier-gpu.

The SLI’d GPUs would produce less heat and be less stressed when I put the 640 as a dedicated physX card. The 660s would render the rest of the effects, such as Water, the sky, environment, models, etc. The physX card would handle all the fog, physics particles, etc. in an ideal world. However, like with experimenting with two different GPUs and SLI/Crossfire, it could put a bottleneck on your system. And this tech doesn’t work with ATI GPUs mixed with NVIDIA GPUs. Sorry.

#17

I could totally see using a 3 card setup with 2 in SLI and a third running a physics engine. mmmmmmmm, too much money.

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