PhysX Hardware Question

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COOLDUDEGAMER

Weaksauce
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Jan 31, 2011
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69
Hello everyone,

I am not sure if this question was asked before or not even upon searching, so, here it goes.

I acquired some hardware for cheap which includes a Q6600 & 8 GB of RAM and some other stuff.

I was wondering if my GTS250 512 MB card could be used as the dedicated card and my older 8600GTS 256 MB as the PhysX card.

Would that make things better or just hamper the performance?

I will mostly be using the system for gaming with World of Tanks & Second Life. Also might run SETI, Rosetta & Folding on this system.

Thanks in advanced.

COOLDUDEGAMER
 
The Q6600 will definitely be stronger than your athlon for any tasks ; a nice "boost" in folding, despite the CPU being quite weak

The 8600 + 250 could be ok in F@H, but ... yeah the 8600 would help with PhysX... though PhysX isn't your main concern at that point
 
Yeah, I have not updated my system listing. Not used that system in a long time. It is actually disconnected behind me as I have been using so many other systems I have built. :p
I could yank my 8800GS 384 MB out of that system as I popped it in after I yanked out my GTS250 as it was acting funky on my PCI-E 1.x boards. x.x

Do you know if the 8800GS would be better for PhysX than the 8600GTS?
 
As far as I can tell, neither World of Tanks nor Second Life uses PhysX. So what did you want a PhysX card for?
 
Hello all again.
I have been using my laptop.

For PhysX, I also play Company of Heroes which uses NVIDIA PhysX & I also play Far Cry 1.
 
OP, most games do not let you offload the Physx calculations to a GPU. 300+games can do CPU Physx, fewer than 10%of those permit GPU usage to do the Physx work.

Just because a game advertises Physx doesn't mean you can benefit at all from having a dedicated card... In fact odds are 9 in10 that you won't.
 
dmanstasiu said:
The Q6600 will definitely be stronger than your athlon for any tasks ; a nice "boost" in folding, despite the CPU being quite weak

The 8600 + 250 could be ok in F@H, but ... yeah the 8600 would help with PhysX... though PhysX isn't your main concern at that point
Click to expand...
8600gt is too weak for handling physx. it used to be the very minimum card listed but is no longer sufficient. a gts250 would handle both graphics almost as well the 8600gt just doing physx. really the neither the gts250 or gts250/8600gt combo would be could enough for running games smoothly that use hardware physx.
 
Eh.........Company of Heroes uses NVIDIA PhysX. I know for a fact that it does. Not sure if you ever played it or not but, it clearly has NVIDIA PhysX all over it. Try it w/ an ATi card. It is almost unplayable. x.x
 
COOLDUDEGAMER said:
Eh.........Company of Heroes uses NVIDIA PhysX. I know for a fact that it does. Not sure if you ever played it or not but, it clearly has NVIDIA PhysX all over it. Try it w/ an ATi card. It is almost unplayable. x.x
Click to expand...

It ONLY does Physx on CPU. CPU Physx and GPU Physx are two entirely different animals. Check the game list in post 7,if your game isn't listed there it in no way benefits from you having a dedicated Physx GPU.
 
Short answer, the GTS250 is a pretty good PhysX card if you have an extra slot and some games that can use it. You might have to go back a couple years, but it was even the recommended PhysX card on [H] for Batman. I haven't run into too many other games that use PhysX, but it's good for both Batman games. I didn't take mine out until I got a 680. Once you get into the higher end cards, then having a secondary card becomes more or less needless.
 
Trust me, I set in the NVIDIA Control Panel to use CPU in Company of Heroes for PhysX and it could not even do LOW PhysX yet when I set it back to GPU, it did the PhysX FINE.
 
COOLDUDEGAMER said:
Trust me, I set in the NVIDIA Control Panel to use CPU in Company of Heroes for PhysX and it could not even do LOW PhysX yet when I set it back to GPU, it did the PhysX FINE.
Click to expand...

Gawd.

Company of Heros DOES NOT USE PHYSX. At all. CoH uses Havok engine for Physics. ANY difference of performance is PURELY due to a driver BUG....NOT due to an actual usage of GPU Physx code.

If you have the game box, you can even read that there is zero CoH support for Physx.
 
HAVOK and PhysX are not related in any way, One is licensed by AMD and the other by nVidia. One uses OpenCL and the other uses CUDA. Perhaps the proper spelling of 'physics' would help alleviate your confusion.

If a game uses HAVOK physics, then it's licensed for AMD technologies or favours it. The same for PhysX.
 
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