hi all, im using a r3e motherboard and just wondering how my bandwidth is going to be affected if i go ahead with my plan of gtx 480 sli and gtx 260 physx. gtx 480 sli will both be 16x speed so what will be left for the physx card? i definatly dont want one of the 480 running at 8x right?
that is an awsome board btw. good choice. but youll see a tiny bit of a performance hit, but its not going to hurt anything. if im not mistaken, that board is going to be like x16/x16 with 2 cards: x16/x8/x8 with 3 cards: x8/x8/x8/x8 if you added a 4th card.
it will be 16x8x8x, if you want full 16 lanes you need an xpander board. http://uk.asus.com/Search.aspx?SearchKey=xpander but to be honest i wouldn't even bother running the 260, especially if you are below 2560x1600
it depends on which version of the pcie specs it is. if its pcie1.0/1.1, then that would be like a 5% drop in performance per card, if its pcie2.0, it would be more like a 2% drop in performance per card.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/23/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x8x8/ http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/25/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x4x4
Some benchmarks show no performance loss with 8x SLI vs 16x SLI.....believe lysaer posted the exact benchmarks...
im running my GTX470 at 8x..the fps is identical to it running at 16x.. if you actually look into the PCIe bandwidth usage, my GTX470 only uses about 2.5Gbps, yet my 9400GT wants 5Gbps (sisoft sandra)
I still don't understand why people use a whole nvidia card for physx, when you can just use the card you have already install.
having a physx card is a huge boost, with physx games obviously. mafia 2 benchmark with gtx 480 doing everything and all max i get about 25 fps. add my 260 doing physx it goes up to 42-45 fps average. for me its def worth it, especially as i paid a lot of money for my 260 few years back and dont want to just end up with 80quid on ebay
480 sli would take an equally bad performance hit im sure so 480 sli and 260 physx is a set up im very excited about having
heres some results from the latest Fluidmark settings: Benchmark Mode Post FX: enabled Multi Core Physx: enabled Async Mode: enabled Emmitters: 3 Particles: 120000 res:1920x1080 fullscreen no AA 3D/GTX470 + Physx/9400GT: Global score: 597 points PhysX score: 27 points (4 SPS avg) GraphX score: 569 points (93 AVG avg) 3D+Physx/GTX470: Global score: 514 points PhysX score: 130 points (21 SPS avg) GraphX score: 384 points (63 AVG avg) 3D/GTX470 + CPU Physx/Q8200@2.5Ghz Global score: 508 points PhysX score: 20 points (3 SPS avg) GraphX score: 487 points (80 AVG avg) thats why...dedicated Physx is faster overall even with a crappy 9400GT! (a 16core card than isnt even supposed to run physx!)..its faster than my CPU...but I7s will kill that!
