Pairing a GTX 285 with 2x GTX 480s... worth it?

harmattan

harmattan

Supreme [H]ardness
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I came into a GTX 285 from a friend and was wondering if I'd see any improvement in Batman, Cryostasis, Mafia II etc. by adding it to my system.

I'm already running two 480s, but would think taking the Physx load off one card should increase FPS a bit, no?
 
Try it, I think the thing to look for is an increase in your minimum fps. OHH, are you doing this in surround? Please try it. I am running 5870's and am doing a comparison of 3 diff Nvidia cards for Physx with them to see what level is required for multimonitor gaming without causing a bottleneck.

I think the bigger deal is does Physx make that much of a difference? It would seem to me that in FPS where the action is fast there is less time to notice it even though it may bring a bit more realism into the game. In some ways it may be a technology trying to find its place.
 
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A dedicated PhysX processor makes a big difference for games like Batman AA and the like. A 285 is the top of the line last gen card so it should do real well in that capacity. But it's gonna consume a lot of power and heat as well as add to your noise levels. If you game with headphones, this probably won't bother you.
 
I'm wondering this as well, I'm running 480gtx sli in surround 2d and I definitly get some slowdowns in mafia 2. If the dedicated physics card makes a big difference I may have to grab one. Id love to see your results
 
Yeah, if you were building a new rig would you get one? And would this interfere with a PCIe slot if I had a new SDD drive in there, I think these new SDD's take a PCIe slot. If I'm wrong let me know, getting back into everything after some time and looking to build a new rig and would love to know about the PhysX performance.
 
Yeah, if you were building a new rig would you get one? And would this interfere with a PCIe slot if I had a new SDD drive in there, I think these new SDD's take a PCIe slot. If I'm wrong let me know, getting back into everything after some time and looking to build a new rig and would love to know about the PhysX performance.
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Its all good, it does not take a PCIe slot but it may use PCIe lines which is different. PCIe lines go to a lot of different things, each line can carry (theoretically)500MB/s. You have 16 of them in a full PCIe slot(8GB/s). Some motherboard chips like the X58 has more than the P55 but motherboard manufactures can add more if they wish to complement what is inherently in the main chip.
 
P55 boards cannot add more, they can only add PCI-e traffic management chips like the nF200 which simulate a x16 slot, but induce latency and usually end up being just an expensive heater for the motherboard because they make jack all difference when actually gaming.
 
I use a 9800gt with gtx480 sli and see a clear benefit so I'd imagine anything faster is that much better... I'd have used one of my 280s, but the antec 1200 is a 7 slot case so I ended up selling them. The single slot 9800gt was a no brainer
 
Digitalcaveman said:
Yeah, if you were building a new rig would you get one? And would this interfere with a PCIe slot if I had a new SDD drive in there, I think these new SDD's take a PCIe slot. If I'm wrong let me know, getting back into everything after some time and looking to build a new rig and would love to know about the PhysX performance.
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What do you mean SDD? If you mean the PCI-E SSD drives, the sure, they consume both a slot and lanes so plan accordingly... No reason you can't just add a SATA SSD though... Real world perf is great... The PCI-E cards are multi controller RAID on a board and without the SATA bottleneck they're hugely fast, but there are growing pains and the extra perf just doesn't directly translate to a seat of the pants impact in typical tasks. Like if loading some app went from 18 seconds on SSD to 11 seconds with PCI-E SSD, would it really feel much different? Personally, I don't feel a huge difference even between raptor raid 0 and my laptop SSD, to be honest, since both come close to maxing SATA on linear reads. Of course synthetic tests or really heavy random read oriented tasks start to show the difference, but it's not a huge deal. Now if you were doing some massively I/O intensive work that is long term (rendering or encoding for hours), then you would really reap maximum benefit from the fastest desktop storage subsystem possible.
 
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