Which GPU for physx

rock2702

Padawan
My rig is in my siggy. I have ordered a 2560x1440 res 27 inch ips monitor.As 7970 doesn't have physx,I am looking for a cheap nvidia GPU to work as a physx card.It should be able to keep up with 7970 and let me play games with physx on high.
 

sam_738844

Wise Old Owl
Months back i created a thread which revealed that Phyx is pretty much dead... cilus also had commented that his GT240 did not make a noticable difference in most of the games as they many of them had CPU-based physics engine. It was also suggested that in near future Phyx would be obsolete and right now its more like a gimmik from Nvidia. a powerful GPU like 7970 is already capable of producing superb image quality, and hence Phyx is not a wise enough decision to have... in a dedicated card. As i said, months have passed, the picture may have changed with emergence of forthcoming engines and architecture. Cilus..care to elaborate the future of Phyx in such perspective?
 

topgear

Super Moderator
Staff member
very nice idea .. even I want to see how much effect phsyX still has on modern games ( of-course TWIMTBP titles only ) and PhysX effect - did I even see one anytime ? lol ;-) BTW, care to share the old thread link of yours ?
 

Cilus

laborare est orare
Buddy, games with CPU physics engine, GT 240 does not make any kind of difference at all and sits idle. For using the PhysX, you need to have game with PhysX implementation and Modded PhysX driver in case the main card is an AMD. Now nVidia already has made the latest version of PhysX engine open for the developer to optimize it for CPU too. Currently PhysX, when running at CPU, uses older single threaded X87 instructions, resulting very poor performance. Now if developers, after having access to the PhysX SDK, can rewrite the CPU code with proper X86 instructions (SSE 2, SSE 3, SSE 4 and AVX/FMA) optimization, PhysX will be running smoothly in CPU too.
 

sam_738844

Wise Old Owl
Here is the good link for Phyx or not discussion

*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/graphic-c...raphics-card-dedicated-phyx-baseline-aux.html
 
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rock2702

Padawan
Thanks for the answers guys.I bought my PC 3 months back and at that time I was almost convinced to go for an nvidia card as usual,because my two previous cards were nvidia and I never had an experience with amd.Also physx in borderlands looks good and a single nvidia GPU,even the 670/680 can't handle advanced physx and graphics alone without performance drops.The 12.11 drivers,3gb frame buffer,384 bit memory bus is what convinced me to take a chance with amd for the first time.I am really happy with the card as I can turn on the AA even at 2560x1440 res and still have good experience.The only game which did not look good on this GPU was borderlands 2,I don't know why and now after switching to a wqhd monitor I wanted to play this game with physx which is only possible with a dedicated nvidia GPU.I was even thinking to get a gtx 650ti only for physx :eek: but that seems way too overkill.Finding a gts 450 is very difficult.I am still on the lookout,my old 9800gtx would have served the purpose,was it not dead ;)
 

sam_738844

Wise Old Owl
I had created that thread to get my self convinced about the use and future of PhyX. without any hesitation i can say that in borderlands2, turning on Phyx just dazzled me. My GT435M can not handle high Phyx, but i have seen the effects, and then i went to a neighbour with GTX460 and greeted my eyes with the effects with a smooth FPS. It was a whole new visual experience for me, i did not notice any substantial difference in turning on Phyx in other games because i DO NOT have enough resources to imply such settings. clearly in the back of my mind i wanted Phyx to be proved rightful. Yes there are arguments which denies its utilization in titles but since i dont posses a high-end card, i barely can justify the difference anyway in any game, so seeing it for real in even one game that i loved, meant a lot to me. and nvidia provided the experience that no AMD could. I sincerely hope that PhyX , however techno-literally opinionated by nvidia it may be, however tentative scope it may have in coming days....should be given a chance. Because it caught my attention...which is not easy.
 

ashis_lakra

Gaming Unlimited
PhysX is definitely not gimmick rather its a visual treat to our eyes even if the debris / flames in games move in weird position. It looks more appealing and engaging while playing. This should definitely be implemented in all future games like Battlefield 4, GTA 6, FarCry 4 etc. The game will look more real when you shoot / use a knife and the enemy's clothes / skins tear down with blood oozing from them lol. Visual treat for me at least.

Anyway, GTs 450 @ 2.5-3k should handle all physx related calculations.
 
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rock2702

Padawan
PhysX is definitely not gimmick rather its a visual treat to our eyes even if the debris / flames in games move in weird position. It looks more appealing and engaging while playing. This should definitely be implemented in all future games like Battlefield 4, GTA 6, FarCry 4 etc. The game will look more real when you shoot / use a knife and the enemy's clothes / skins tear down with blood oozing from them lol. Visual treat for me at least.

Anyway, GTs 450 @ 2.5-3k should handle all physx related calculations.

Can u gimme a link as to where can I find gts 450 at that price?
 

Cilus

laborare est orare
PhysX is definitely not gimmick rather its a visual treat to our eyes even if the debris / flames in games move in weird position. It looks more appealing and engaging while playing. This should definitely be implemented in all future games like Battlefield 4, GTA 6, FarCry 4 etc. The game will look more real when you shoot / use a knife and the enemy's clothes / skins tear down with blood oozing from them lol. Visual treat for me at least.

Anyway, GTs 450 @ 2.5-3k should handle all physx related calculations.

Most of the games you have mentioned, use either their in-house CPU Physics Engine or Open source HAVOC or Bullet Physics Engine which runs on CPU. Not to mention, they offer better quality Physics implementation than the best PhysX implementation til date. In future, there is a high chance, we will be seeing new Physics Engine developed using OpenCL or DirectCompute to actually take the parallel processing power of Modern Graphics cards. In fact, these days, nVidia is more busy in OpenCL optimization in their cards than making PhysX better.
 
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