help to buy a physix video card.

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rickyman123

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Dec 5, 2007
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i am looking to buy either 9800gt, gt 240 or gts 250 for primary. i want to buy another card for physix card. which card is better for it. 9600gt, gt 220 or 9500gt.
 
you should get a gtx 295 for your display card and a gtx 285 for physx. or you could wait for the gf100 and get one of those for the display card and a gtx 295 for physx. that is what i would do.
 
if i put the gt 240 and 9600gt, what driver do i need to download in order to get the physic video card effect.

i have amd motherboard, will it works?
 
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I have a GTX 285 which is not being used most of the time. Im planning on using it as a PhysX card along side my 5870 with Eyefinity. I have not been able to determine if there would be a major difference in PhysX Processing between a GTX 285 or if I should just buy a cheap 9600GT(or best budget GPU), has anybody posted some benchmarks with ATI/ Nvidia PhysX comparing the different cards?

@Ricky, if I come accross an answer I'll post back, as I am undergoing the same thing here.


EDIT: okay I think I found the answer.. basically the faster the GPU the better the PhysX will be, correct me if Im wrong. And also, here is a pretty good guide: http://www.overclock.net/graphics-cards-general/633137-guide-enable-ati-nvidia-physx-single.html GL
 
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If you run a dedicated PhysX GPU, buy big...
Yes, PhysX scales well. Basically, the better the card, the better your PhysX performance. It just comes down to how much benefit you'll get from PhysX vs. how much you want to spend on the card. People seem to be using a guideline of using half your main card's number of shaders for PhysX. If your main card has 500 shaders, then a card with 250 shaders would be a good match for PhysX.

Note that ATI and Nvidia do shaders differently, so find a comparable Nvidia card and use its number of shaders for your calculation. Also, the latest Nvidia drivers have ATI-blocking code in them, so you'll need a hack to mix the two. Vista doesn't support multiple video drivers simultaneously, so you can't mix ATI and PhysX at all (only 7 or XP).
 
rickyman123 said:
if i put the gt 240 and 9600gt, what driver do i need to download in order to get the physic video card effect.

i have amd motherboard, will it works?
Click to expand...

The forceware drivers from nvidia have all of the video and physx drivers you need for both cards. Once you install the drivers you can set the 9600gt for physx in the nvidia control panel.

Any board with more than 1 pcie lane should work.
 
rickyman123 said:
also does it matter if the slot is 16x or 8x?
Click to expand...

Realistically, I'd say no. Though you'll need a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot to get the maximum performance from newer generation cards like the 5870, it only impacts your performance by one or two FPS at the very most if you use an x8 slot.
 
eddieck said:
Realistically, I'd say no. Though you'll need a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot to get the maximum performance from newer generation cards like the 5870, it only impacts your performance by one or two FPS at the very most if you use an x8 slot.
Click to expand...

right, that's if you're going to use a high-end card for graphics. For physx, x8 is PLENTY. In fact, I have a GT 240 (it was on sale, posted on [H]ot Deals last week, don't judge me) hooked up to an x4 slot and I don't notice a difference between that and x8. The lowest FPS in fluidmark is 61 fps in either configuration. My primary display adapter is a 5850 by the way.
 
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