HD 6970 + Dedicated GT 430 Hybrid Physx Mini Review

dook43 said:
dook43 said:
It's using tessellation to a point beyond where it's noticeable but severely impacts performance on AMD hardware. This is one of Nvidia's tricks to prop up the GTX 580 versus Cayman.
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Uh, there's no trickery going on here... there are multiple levels of tessellation available from within Arkham City's settings, so you can turn it down (or off completely) while still leaving the game in DX 11 mode.

And lets not forget, AMD's drivers override in-game tessellation settings by default, so AMD is in complete control of how much tessellation is being run on their cards. Even if Nvidia were asking developers to increase tessellation to absurd levels, it wouldn't matter. You can also uncheck "AMD Optimized" and lower the slider yourself if you want some additional performance (at the cost of image quality).

Ngubh.png


The "AMD Optimized" setting very noticeably degrades tessellation quality in a lot of DX11 games in order to keep performance up. AMD's cards (those from before the HD 7000 series) are simply weak in the tessellation department, even at nominal levels of tessellation, and AMD obviously knows it.
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I'll quote HardOCP here, this destroys your argument.
Batman: Arkham City : In BM: AA, the XFX R7970 Black Edition easily destroyed the AMD Radeon HD 6970. We were able to run at a higher resolution with the highest in-game settings. We feel this is mostly due to the fact that Tessellation is much faster on the new Radeon HD 7970. The MSI N580GTX Lightning XE 3GB was not able to play at 2560x1600 with decent performance, so we had to lower it down to 1920x1200 with 8X CSAA. The MSI N580GTX Lightning XE was faster than the Radeon HD 6970, but the new XFX R7970 killed it in performance.
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The quote agrees with everything I said...

The quote says they found that 7000 series cards have better tessellation performance than 6000 series cards... which is exactly what I said in my post.

And what I said is still perfectly true and not at all invalidated by that quote from Hard|OCP. Nvidia CANNOT screw up performance on AMD cards by forcing developers to use absurdly high tessellation quality, and they can't do it because AMD's video drivers have full control over tessellation quality. AMD can lower it if they want to, and the user can decrease the quality further for more performance gains.
 
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i picked up a PNY GT 430 2GB over the weekend at Staples, planning on playing the Batman games and the 430 was on clearance at staples so i went for it. got physx going with the 1.05ff and 285.xx drivers, just had to make sure to run the patch in safe mode.

i tried to unplug the fan that it came with to make it a silent card, but when i did a fluidmark bench the card got up to 95 degrees at 80% load. i quickly plugged the tiny fan back in and it really isn't that loud and stays at 35% power most of the time, now temps at 80% load are 65 degrees

yay Hybrid PhysX!
 
Nice nice!

I'll be popping in a new GTX680 on Tuesday when it arrives, and when I do, my old GTX460 768mb will be pulling physx duty.

This is all for Red Orchestra 2, which is extremely CPU intensive when PhysX is not enabled, and can actually be CPU limited, which is unusual with modern games.
 
bigted said:
i picked up a PNY GT 430 2GB over the weekend at Staples, planning on playing the Batman games and the 430 was on clearance at staples so i went for it. got physx going with the 1.05ff and 285.xx drivers, just had to make sure to run the patch in safe mode.

i tried to unplug the fan that it came with to make it a silent card, but when i did a fluidmark bench the card got up to 95 degrees at 80% load. i quickly plugged the tiny fan back in and it really isn't that loud and stays at 35% power most of the time, now temps at 80% load are 65 degrees

yay Hybrid PhysX!
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The good thing about those small fans is they often have easily acessible non-PWM fan connectors so you can just wire them up to a proper manual fan controller along with your case fans. I did the same with an EAH3870 I owned in the past. Made all the difference, as the fan didn't need to run at the speed it did.
 
Damn Gigabyte gt430 occupies 3 slots. I had to remove the fan shroud and screw the fans directly to the heatsink.

PhysX mod works just fine, why did I do it? I did it to enhance my experience with Batman AC.
 
Would a PCI GT 430 card work for physx? My 6970 takes up 3 slots so I would need to use a standard PCI card. I don't know if there would be enough bandwidth.
John
 
Doon1 said:
Would a PCI GT 430 card work for physx? My 6970 takes up 3 slots so I would need to use a standard PCI card. I don't know if there would be enough bandwidth.
John
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i would say if you already have it, try it out, but don't spend money on one just for physx since i don't know anyone who has tried this yet

i did just find this review at newegg: here...

Pros: This is the most powerful PCI graphics card I have found.
A really good option for those with only one PCI-E express x16 slot who want a PhysX card.
The card also seems to be very well built and of good qaulity.

Cons: A little pricey for what it can do.

Other Thoughts: N/A
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bigted said:
i would say if you already have it, try it out, but don't spend money on one just for physx since i don't know anyone who has tried this yet

i did just find this review at newegg: here...
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It won't be native PCI though, there will be a bridge chip of some sort on it. Who knows what kind of impact that will have.

Depending on how deep your main video card is (that is, how much space there is between the bottom of the heatsink enclosure and the covered PCIe slot) you may also consider trying one of many flexible risers.

Something like this (google it, there are many makers)
 
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Zarathustra[H];1038706499 said:
It won't be native PCI though, there will be a bridge chip of some sort on it. Who knows what kind of impact that will have.
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you're right, there is a PCIe to PCI chip on the baord, but i'm guessing the chip can handle the whopping 133mb/s maximum transfer rate that the PCI bus can handle. and it's obviously a limiting factor, but is it so limiting that physx calculations will be drastically reduced? i don't know, only one way to find out...
 
I am so glad to have found this thread. I have an HD6870 and I want to add a cheap Nvidia card for PhysX at some point (especially for Borderlands 2). However, I only have PCI and PCI-E x1 slots free.

The Zotac PCI card looks like a decent option. But has anyone tried using a

PCI Express X1 to X16 Low Profile Slot Extension Adapter

with an x16 PCI-E card? The regular PCI card sounds like a more elegant solution, though.

Side-note:

PhysX 3.x SDK was released in May and is supposed to improve automated multi-threading and CPU-only performance but I am not sure if Borderlands 2 will use that. (Arkham City only uses 2.8 and is unplayable on CPU). Maybe if we're lucky those of us with hexacores and higher will have a chance of doing PhysX without an Nvidia GPU at all in games that use that...
 
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Jinx01 said:
I am so glad to have found this thread. I have an HD6870 and I want to add a cheap Nvidia card for PhysX at some point (especially for Borderlands 2). However, I only have PCI and PCI-E x1 slots free.

The Zotac PCI card looks like a decent option. But has anyone tried using a

PCI Express X1 to X16 Low Profile Slot Extension Adapter

with an x16 PCI-E card? The regular PCI card sounds like a more elegant solution, though.

Side-note:

PhysX 3.x SDK was released in May and is supposed to improve automated multi-threading and CPU-only performance but I am not sure if Borderlands 2 will use that. (Arkham City only uses 2.8 and is unplayable on CPU). Maybe if we're lucky those of us with hexacores and higher will have a chance of doing PhysX without an Nvidia GPU at all in games that use that...
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your x1 bandwidth would be greatly improved over PCI though, x1 1.0 is 2.5gb/s and 2.0 is 5.0gb/s so although physx probably won't be saturating that, it will will be a lot better than 133mhz of the PCI bus
 
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Jinx01 said:
I am so glad to have found this thread. I have an HD6870 and I want to add a cheap Nvidia card for PhysX at some point (especially for Borderlands 2). However, I only have PCI and PCI-E x1 slots free.

The Zotac PCI card looks like a decent option. But has anyone tried using a

PCI Express X1 to X16 Low Profile Slot Extension Adapter

with an x16 PCI-E card? The regular PCI card sounds like a more elegant solution, though.

Side-note:

PhysX 3.x SDK was released in May and is supposed to improve automated multi-threading and CPU-only performance but I am not sure if Borderlands 2 will use that. (Arkham City only uses 2.8 and is unplayable on CPU). Maybe if we're lucky those of us with hexacores and higher will have a chance of doing PhysX without an Nvidia GPU at all in games that use that...
Click to expand...

Cool adapter, but $24 for it :eek:

You could also notch the back of a 1x slot and insert a 16x card like so http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/249291-30-card
 
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Why not sell both cards and just got a GTX 670 or 680? Wouldn't that lower your power consumption & heat while also providing you with an equivalent graphical solution?
 
Chaos744 said:
Why not sell both cards and just got a GTX 670 or 680? Wouldn't that lower your power consumption & heat while also providing you with an equivalent graphical solution?
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If you have a HD7950 or HD7970 and enjoy playing games that need PhysX to perform better a cheap dedicated Geforce card seems like a good affordable solution and lets the user hold on to the HD7950 or HD7970.

All about options. This is good option if desired.
 
i have a 5870 2gb toxic and a gtx470. anyone think i will get a boost or lose performance adding physx. i see some setups get a boost some lose fps big time but gain physx.
 
if you are using CPU for physX then you will get a boost. If you are not using physX at all, but do enable it you will lose FPS because of all the extra processing being done, even with a dedicated physX card.
 
My GT240 had been servicing me well as a PPU. It has a similar spec of a GT430 with 96 CUDA cores and updated architecture that improves GPGPU performance compared to the G92 and its iterations. I was able to play Batman AC at maximum and never had a slowdown except in the Ice shooting benchmark which drops around mid 30's, of course that was done with my HD 6970 over a year ago. Ill try to run that benchmark again with my HD 7970 and the latest drivers to see how it fares.
 
If you want to get Hybrid PhysX working with the latest drivers/PhysX check out my thread:

http://HardForum.com/showthread.php?t=1713769

You probably only need an additional cheap >=GeForce8 256MB (with any OS other than Vista.)

This is the best way to run PhysX v2 games and PhysX v3 seems to work fine on the CPU. (No actual games that use that are coming out soon/planned yet, though.)

Red Orchestra 2 has a bug/issue where GPU PhysX cannot be enabled regardless of any settings, it's CPU only. There is alot of misinfo on this around the web. Maybe a future patch will fix this, but I doubt it.
 
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