GTX 970 combined with a 1080?

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Pabuchok

Gawd
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Jun 8, 2000
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I used ATI/AMD cards for a long time and with each new generation I'd sell off my old AMD card. I finally switched back to Nvidia about a year and half ago when I bought a 970.

Now I'm probably going to purchase a 1080 at or soon after launch. With DX12 and PhysX, can I or does it make sense to, use my 970 combined with a 1080?

TIA
 
I second that, unless DX12 suddenly picks up the pace and mad games appear, better off selling it now and picking up a 1080 (or 1070) when possible.
 
If you like physx enough then why not? 970 is fast enough. Please correct me if I'm wrong, never had a dedicated physx card.
 
I've been reading up on dedicated Physx cards today as I'm about to upgrade to a 1080. So far, I'm leaning towards a 'no'. There's a few things to keep in mind:

- Obviously, it only makes a difference in games that utilize physx.
- Modern games like Arkham Knight and Witcher III see absolutely no benefit from a dedicated card.

Here's an article from VolnaPC that seems to like the dedicated card, but keep in mind that the games tested are older: Dedicated Physx

Article from TechnologyX that gives some benchmarks: Dedicated Physx
- For some reason they tested non-Physx games, so you'll have to dig through their benchmarks and find the ones that matter to you.

From what I've read, dedicated Physx cards are something that will get you a performance boost in older Physx games, but not on newer ones. BUT, if you upgrade to a 1080, then there's probably no point in going for a dedicated card as you'll have more than enough power to get 60fps @ 4k.

Edit: Here's a thread from the Physx [H] Forum that gives some benchmarks with a Titan X + 970, which should give you a rough estimate: Titan X + 970 GTX
 
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DX12 Multiadapter is nowhere ready and DX11 AFR SLI/CF is also becoming more and more of a dinosaur and seeing a lack of support. If anything you are better off buying the fastest single GPU today more than anytime in the recent past.
 
When I upgraded to a 980Ti around this time last year I kept one of my 680s as a PhysX card and it makes a noticeable difference in Batman: Arkham Origins and Arkham Knight when using PhysX. I remember the built-in benchmark for Origins giving me an average of 109 fps with the 680 doing PhysX while having the 980Ti do all the PhysX work gave me around 92fps. This was at 1440p with everything maxed using FXAA. On Arkham Knight the 680 helped my minimums out a lot. During the beginning of the benchmark when the camera would swoop around the smoke my fps would drop into the mid 30s with the 980Ti set to PhysX but with the 680 doing PhysX it would drop to the low 50s, high 40s. With normal game play of Arkham Knight when there would be a lot of PhysX smoke and debris on screen my fps would remain over 60fps during most of these parts. Of course this was when Arkham Knight was still pretty broken so overall performance may have improved enough since then to where a dedicated PhysX card isn't needed. When I ran the benchmark for Arkham City the 680 didn't seem to help at all for the PhysX effects. Overall, having a dedicated PhysX card is nice but I could do without it. I plan to sell my 980Ti to a friend and get a 1080 and I may go ahead and sell the 680 as well if the 1080 can handle PhysX fine without it.
 
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