Ok folks.. over the past couple of months, I've upgraded my system quite a bit.. and it's left me with a few extra spare parts. An 8600GT and a 610. Question is.. should I bother using one of those as a dedicated physx card? I am using a 650Ti backed up by the FX4100.. so not sure if I have enough computing power as it is to play modern games like the new Tomb Raider..etc. Thoughts?
I am not sure... I was curious as to being prepared for needing it. If the driver preps the system use of Physx, albeit CPU or GPU, I see no sense in using a second card if a game offloads it to the CPU seeing as I have enough cores to run them... however, if a game offloads to a GPU, I'd rather have a secondary one to commit to it, instead of the primary.
You certainly do not want it running on your CPU it will not run good at all if you just did a full install of your nvida drivers then physx is already installed and it should show it in NCP. As said earlier the 8800 and the 610 are too slow and too few cuda cores to properly do physx.
That 8600GT is a bit weak for PhysX. I've tried a 9600GT, which has double the amount of shaders (at similar clocks?), and I've gotten up to 70% usage I think on Batman: Arkham Asylum with my GTX260. Round 2, I used my 7970 as primary card and the GTX260 as secondary PhysX card and also got up to 70% GPU usage in the same game. GTX260 = ~3 x 9600GT, and 7970 = ~3-4 x GTX260, so that makes sense for the numbers (70%) to be the same. 8600 = ~ 1/2 9600GT, lighter games might manage, but up to Mafia II and especially Batman: Arkham Asylum (Arkham City as well, of course), you might want to try Normal instead of High. Also, try with and without extra PhysX GPU. It might slow you down in those tough cases.
I had 9800GT 512MB as PhysX card earlier and it did really well with games. But i woud say thats minimum.
Well... after a few tests, I pulled the plug on using either card. 1. Mobo won't boot with a second card in the second x16 slot, only the x8. 2. Firefox ended up having rendering issues, slowed down.. and sometimes stopped responding with sites using flash. 3. Actually lost pts using 3DMark11 during it's rendering tests... tho it didn't mention any physx testing on the GPU, only CPU. 4. Lost my sound icon from system tray, and noticed I now had 4 HDMI sound outputs in sound panel. (came back after removing the second card) and a few other glitches such as slower system restarts... so out the door that test went! Thanks for all the info and replies.. helps get things moving faster, appreciate it!