Newbie PhysX Question

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Burner27

Supreme [H]ardness
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Oct 23, 2000
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Moved from other forum............


I have been perusing the forums for many moons but rarely have ventured into the video card forum, but I did have a question.......

I see that some people have primary cards (i.e.-- GTX 260s, 275s, 280s,..etc) and then use 'weaker' cards (i.e.-- 8800 series) as a Physx card.

Doesn't the primary card handle Physx already? How does the PC know that the secondary card is used as a Physx card? Do you need special drivers for the primary or secondary card?

Thx
 
I'm fairly sure that you just set the card you want to use for physx in the nvidia control panel
 
As far as I know it works on any mobo. Mine is a Crossfire mobo and it works fine and yes, you have the option to select which card you want to use for Physx in the Nvidia Control Panel.
When I run games I have my 9800 GTX+ take care of Physx.
The only time I let my GTX280 do it is when I run 3D Mark Vantage because the CPU test uses the GPU physx for some reason so I get a higher CPU score if I use my 280 vs the 9800...weird that it works like that.
 
Agreed. It should be fine for some but just like with other graphics...the more the begin to push the features the better a faster card will perform compared to a slower one.
 
Another thing to be aware of is which configs work with which OS.
All OS's (XP, Vista, W7) support 2+ NVidia cards in the system.
Problems occur if you have an ATI gfx card and want to use an NVidia card for PhysX.

XP allows more than 1 manufacturers display driver to be loaded so you can do whatever you want.
Vista only allows 1 manufacturers display drivers to be loaded at once so cannot support an ATI card with NVidia for PhysX.
Windows 7 is quoted to support more than 1 display driver at once but the RC version doesnt, so no ATI + NVidia support for now.


The primary card can handle hardware PhysX if it is NVidia, ATI cards do not support hardware PhysX.
So you can have PhysX hardware support with just one NVidia GPU.
Whether thats enough depends on the card for PhysX, the game and the settings you use.

For example, Cryostasis is the latest PhysX game and even with high end SLI/Crossfire and another fast card for PhysX, framerates are still quite low at times.
No doubt there will be patches/optimisations as its still early days for PhysX in hardware for most programmers.
 
So do you still have to load the drivers for your dedicated PHYSX card? I'm talking Windows XP here? If all you're doing is enabling the feature in the nvidia control panel and you're not using the PHYSX card for displaying images, then Windows wouldn't need to know anything about it. Or maybe that's too simplistic?
 
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