A good enough dedicated Physx card.

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce' started by 13thCaesar, May 1, 2016.

  1. 13thCaesar

    13thCaesar Member Guru

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    Hey guys.

    Given my plan to move to a single card solution once the new Nvidia's come out.
    What would be a good card to dedicate to Physx.

    I was wondering because since the second card would be purely doing nothing but physx calculations, how good does the card need to be. Would a medium or even low end card do ok as a dedicated Physx card.

    As I type this I find this link which is pretty informative..
    http://www.volnapc.com/all-posts/how-much-difference-does-a-dedicated-physx-card-make

    Anyway I'll let this post stand to see what, of anyone else's experiences with a dedicated card.
     
  2. TheDeeGee

    TheDeeGee Ancient Guru

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    I remember that when you had a 580 you needed atleast 480 as Physx Card. Any lower and you would hurt FPS.

    Not sure that still applies.

    580 - 480
    680 - 570/580
    780 - 670/680
    980 - 970?
     
  3. -Tj-

    -Tj- Ancient Guru

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    Gtx 750 or 750ti
    Gtx 950

    Is more then enough.

    Even Gt 740 is with gddr5 ram.
     
  4. volkov956

    volkov956 Ancient Guru

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    i use my spare quadro 5000 does the job well for physx but with most games it pretty much doesnt do much these days
     

  5. Xuanzang

    Xuanzang Master Guru

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    Im currently using a GTX770 as dedicated PhysX along with my 980Ti, but do i really need a dedicated PhysX card? I'm not sure tbh. I only put it in since i had it laying around.

    When i ran the PLA Gaming Benchmark to test PhysX at high, i had around 25 - 30 FPS increase with a dedicated PhysX card. The funny thing though, is that when i have the 770 enabled, i see less debris in the explotions, the glass shattering are not even visible. If i let the 980Ti do the job, i see alot more debris.

    Maybe the 770 isn't powerful enough?
     
  6. Netherwind

    Netherwind Ancient Guru

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    This dedicated PhysX business is dodgy. There aren't many games that support it but those who do benefit largely from a PhysX card. On the other hand can an unused PhysX card affect the FPS in a non-PhysX game negatively.
     
  7. Smiley_ie

    Smiley_ie Guest

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    Im running Gtx980 and have Gtx660 i put it in about 6 months ago and spent a few hours doing benchmarks on average i seen 2-3 fps more running the 660 as a dedicated PhysX.
     
  8. stereoman

    stereoman Master Guru

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    I got a 750ti to run as dedicated physx with my 980 and it did make a difference with games like Mafia II and Borderlands but it made no difference with gameworks games like Witcher 3 and Arkham Knight, personally i'd save the money and just buy a single card and let that handle the physx as well or if you really need a dedicated physx card then go sli buy two matching cards and if the game doesn't work right with sli you can just use the 2nd card as physx,

    only time I'd bother with a dedicated physx card is if you have a spare card lying around otherwise save your money.
     
  9. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    In older games that used PhysX, a dedicated PhysX card was often necessary to increase performance.

    But nowadays we have PhysX 3.xx which is much faster than the older versions due to multithreading and SIMD support. For instance, a lot of the effects that used to require hardware acceleration, ie cloth simulation and destruction, now run very well on the CPU.

    By the time Pascal comes out, it will be even more unnecessary to get a dedicated PhysX card, as Pascal will have much faster compute performance, plus it should support asynchronous compute with CUDA so that compute and graphics can run in parallel.
     
  10. -Tj-

    -Tj- Ancient Guru

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    Physx already runs in parallel/async since fermi, by maxwell its the most efficient, well obviously.

    I think Pascal will raise it further with extra unified memory, other then that its base cuda 6.0 doesn't look anything different compared to maxwell cuda5.2.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA
     

  11. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    I used to think that myself, until I saw scrutinized the Batman Arkham Knight benchmarks. The performance hit from enabling PhysX for Maxwell, is the same as it is for Kepler.

    If PhysX was running in parallel with graphics, then the performance hit would be much less..
     
  12. kanej2007

    kanej2007 Guest

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    Wow, that's VERY minimal, thought it would of been slightly more...

    If you had a 680 you'd probably get quite a bit more than 2-3 fps. Perhaps 10-15 more? It would be nice to see what boost you'd see from that combo.
     
  13. -Tj-

    -Tj- Ancient Guru

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    Yes but it renders it faster as overal.



    That hit will be the same on Pascal too..
     
  14. Li4m79

    Li4m79 Ancient Guru

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    when i used to have a 580, i had a 9800GTX+ as my dedicated physX card and i got fps gains and full physx in games
     
  15. 13thCaesar

    13thCaesar Member Guru

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    If you have a look at that link I posted in my first post the guy who did the research makes for a pretty convincing reason to have a physx card. And the benchmarks he did shows there is definitely a benefit for the most part.

    But that is only 1 review and yes, the games that have decent physx are few.
     

  16. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    Yes, and one common theme in all of those games, is that they are older. If you want to play those games, then sure, maybe a PhysX card is in order. But for newer games, it's not going to help much because both the software and the hardware have evolved since then.

    Most of the effects seen in those games now use the CPU, with the exception of volumetric smoke/fog and turbulence. But even those eventually will run on the CPU.

    As CPUs get wider SIMD units (512 bit is coming) and more cores, it makes sense to tap in the CPU for advanced physics calculations rather than the GPU, since the GPU is already busy doing rendering.

    NVidia knows this, which is why when they redesigned PhysX 3.xx, they made sure it was built from the ground up to use multithreading and SIMD. And PhysX 3.xx runs really fast on the CPU.

    Give you an idea, the Witcher 3 uses PhysX 3.xx and it has some of the nicest cloth simulation found in any game.

    And it runs on the CPU..
     

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