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PhysX?

rjolin01

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 31, 2008
Messages
1,399
What is the benifit of PhysX? i currently have 8800gt sli set up with a 3rd pci-e x16 slot available. Will my 8600gt help at all. I am thinking uping to gtx260 SLI. Should I keep one my 8800 gt for physX? I like to play First Person Shooters (i.e. BF2, 2142, COD) so better frames per sec would help. Basiclly what is best way to take advantage of my 3 PCI-e x16 slots.
 
Firstly, only PhysX games will benefit from a dedicated PhysX precessor, other games won't gain anything from a dedicated PhysX processor except for a higher power consumption.

Secondly:
The list for PhysX games is quite long but the list for PhysX games that are worth playing is quite short. To name a few:

UT3
GRAW series
Mirror's Edge
Gears of War
 
What is the benifit of PhysX?
Here's what NVIDIA says.

Should I keep one my 8800 gt for physX?
Unless you want to sell it, sure. You can use it as a dedicated PhysX processor.

I like to play First Person Shooters (i.e. BF2, 2142, COD) so better frames per sec would help.
Like alg said, a dedicated card for PhysX will only benefit you in games that support hardware PhysX. The game has to use the PhysX middleware and have additional support for hardware offloading. There's a full list here.
 
Please note that not all games in the PhysX games list support GPU PhysX.
 
So far... :D

I also think an 8600GT is just too slow, an 8800gt would do better for sure. ;)
 
What is the benifit of PhysX? i currently have 8800gt sli set up with a 3rd pci-e x16 slot available. Will my 8600gt help at all. I am thinking uping to gtx260 SLI. Should I keep one my 8800 gt for physX? I like to play First Person Shooters (i.e. BF2, 2142, COD) so better frames per sec would help. Basiclly what is best way to take advantage of my 3 PCI-e x16 slots.

Before anything else, you should know that PhysX is a physics API. It can be licensed by game developers to be used in their games and provide a physicalized environment. When NVIDIA bought AGEIA a while back, they ported that API to CUDA (think of CUDA as a language that any GeForce 8 or higher can understand), effectively allowing PhysX calls to be executed on the GPU, instead of the CPU. It is entirely up to the user of a GeForce to enable or disable hardware physics acceleration.

That said, the benefit is that given the highly parallel nature of a GPU, certain computations (physics is one of them) will be executed much faster on it, than even on the most powerful CPUs. This allows for much more realistic and complex physics effects (like cloth, hair, fire, water, etc) that could never be used before, given how poorly CPUs handle them. Your 8600 GT will definitely help, but as far as the tests I've seen, a 9600 GT is the minimum you should have as dedicated physics hardware and a 8800 GT would obviously be even better.
 
so say this is the case...i have 2 gtx 260 in sli. and a 8800gt in the 3rd slot. the 8800gt would be the PhysX card? no monitor gets hooked to it right? it wont hurt any games that dont use physx to have it there? what about multiple monitors? i have two i currently use but will be acquiring a 3rd soon. just want to know best set up with what i have to get best performance over all outta my rig.
 
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