Dedicated physx card

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nelis

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Hi there. I want to buy a dedicated physx card as some of my physx games are not running that well.

My system specs:

Intel Q9450 OC @ 3.4GHz
4GB DDR2 1066Mhz RAM
Win7 64bit
MSI Geforce gtx280 1GB OC edition
MSI p45 Platinum
Corsair 650w PSU.

I have the following choices

http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=130&cat2_no=663&prod_no=1868

R1362.3

http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=130&cat2_no=705&prod_no=1987

R1116.06

http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=130&cat2_no=705&prod_no=1958

R899.46

Will it be worth it or just a waste of my money.
 
If I were you I'd rather wait until the DirectX 11 cards come down in price. Then you can buy one of them and use the gtx280 for physx if you want... though it's probably overkill. It's up to you but I personally don't think it's worth it.
 
thanks for the reply

ok anyone else that can also just confirm this?
 
A physx card will not make any game run faster. It will just enable some extra special effects.
 
I agree with Solitude, get a GTX 460 1GB OC and then use this one for physx, but like he said, not really worth it. I was looking into doing this as well, as I am running an ATI card, but saw on PH that the guys are selling the cards again they used for physx, cause it's not really worth it.

BTW, your card shouldn't have a problem with handling physx.
 
well it's just that mafia 2 runs at 34FPS if I activate physx and when I disable it it runs at 60+FPS but I did the clothing physx hack and now it's working fine
 
xumwun said:
A physx card will not make any game run faster. It will just enable some extra special effects.
Click to expand...

Agreed. In fact, you should see a slowdown in frame rate if you enable PhysX, unless you are running an insanely fast system already. Enabling PhysX usually means more physics effects are simulated, which translates into additional triangles to render, hence the net slowdown.

It reminds me of the good old days when Aureal and Creative were fighting the A3D vs EAX wars w.r.t. ambient sound rendering. Back then (before 3D acceleration actually became mainstream), turning on the enhanced ambient sound rendering also slowed down the games, despite the comparatively powerful DSP that was now doing the sound rendering.
 
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Physx is not worth the money imo. Few games use it, and to be quite frank its a poorly coded cash cow for nvidia. Any half decent CPU could do physx if coded correctly. Besides, DX11 comes with its own (actual) physics engine, whereas physx is only for show (eye candy).
 
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nelis said:
please check this http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/batman-arkham-asylum,2465-11.html it will run faster with the dedicated physx card. I'm running Nvidia gtx280 so my card is already physx. The dedicated one will just render the physx and leave more processing power for the GTX280. I just don't know if it's worth the money.
Click to expand...

I pulled out my Ageia Physx card the other day as the Nvidia card performs much better without it.Physx is awsum but your right switching it on will drastically reduce game speed.
 
Archer said:
Physx is not worth the money imo. Few games use it, and to be quite frank its a poorly coded cash cow for nvidia. Any half decent CPU could do physx if coded correctly. Besides, DX11 comes with its own (actual) physics engine, whereas physx is only for show (eye candy).
Click to expand...

Apparently it was deliberately coded to run crap on a CPU and if coded properly would run faster than on a gpu.
 
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Maybe I should ask my brother to lend me his 8800GTS 512mb card to test the physx.
 
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PhysX is a proper physics engine (rigid body and fluid). DX11 does not have a physics engine. It has support for Compute Shaders, i.e. DirectCompute, which means that you can have GPU accelerated physics via this GPGPU api without using OpenCL or CUDA. In order to do this you would have to get your own physics engine to pass instructions to this api, which AMD is hoping will be achieved using the open-source Bullet physics engine.

xumwun said:
Apparently it was deliberately coded to run crap on a CPU and if coded properly would run faster than on a gpu.
Click to expand...

Bingo. My money is on Bullet. Havok is a non-entity, since HavokFX seems to have been canned.
 
Rudimental said:
PhysX is a proper physics engine (rigid body and fluid). DX11 does not have a physics engine. It has support for Compute Shaders, i.e. DirectCompute, which means that you can have GPU accelerated physics via this GPGPU api without using OpenCL or CUDA. In order to do this you would have to get your own physics engine to pass instructions to this api, which AMD is hoping will be achieved using the open-source Bullet physics engine.

Bingo. My money is on Bullet. Havok is a non-entity, since HavokFX seems to have been canned.
Click to expand...

Physx is eye candy only, it (iirc) has nothing to do with actual game physics, stuff that would affect your character. DX11 cards can handle these player affecting physics calculations as you pointed out. And open source is better than proprietary for a consumer environment so I see no need (for myself) to support physx in any way.
 
Archer said:
Physx is eye candy only, it (iirc) has nothing to do with actual game physics, stuff that would affect your character. DX11 cards can handle these player affecting physics calculations as you pointed out. And open source is better than proprietary for a consumer environment so I see no need (for myself) to support physx in any way.
Click to expand...

'PhysX is currently used for effects that are largely eye-candy' doesn't actually mean 'PhysX can only be used for effects that are largely eye-candy'. Think about it for a second: GPU-based physics engine that can only be efficiently processed by Nividia cards used as your primary physics engine. Recipe for disaster. The fact of the matter is that currently PhysX seems the only hardware accelerated physics engine (for eye-candy physics or whatever), and Nvidia 'assists' developers who use it, so don't expect it to disappear until a better alternative arrives.
 
Rudimental said:
'PhysX is currently used for effects that are largely eye-candy' doesn't actually mean 'PhysX can only be used for effects that are largely eye-candy'. Think about it for a second: GPU-based physics engine that can only be efficiently processed by Nividia cards used as your primary physics engine. Recipe for disaster. The fact of the matter is that currently PhysX seems the only hardware accelerated physics engine (for eye-candy physics or whatever), and Nvidia 'assists' developers who use it, so don't expect it to disappear until a better alternative arrives.
Click to expand...

Fair enough :)
We agree on the proprietary disaster.
Am under the impresion that DX11 allows for GPU physics calcs that could get rid of physx? Is there a DX11 game planed/released that uses physx? Sorry I'm too tired to do my own research on this today.
 
Archer said:
Am under the impresion that DX11 allows for GPU physics calcs that could get rid of physx? Is there a DX11 game planed/released that uses physx? Sorry I'm too tired to do my own research on this today.
Click to expand...

What PhysX does is pass the instructions to the GPU in CUDA (GPGPU) form (independently of Directx, I think). Theoretically, you should be able to use DirectCompute to handle the calculations that PhysX does without using the PhysX api, but I don't know that anyone (i.e. ATI) has actually implemented such a PhysX 'solver' or whether it is practically possible or desirable.

This is how I understand PhysX works, and could be used with DirectCompute to run PhysX GPU- acceleration on non-Nvidia cards, very roughly:

PhysX: Physics engine -> PhysX api (CUDA)-> GPU (or CPU for non-Nvidia cards)
DirectCompute 'solver': Physics engine -> PhysX-to-DirectCompute solver -> DirectCompute api (Compute Shader) -> GPU

But I think this would be a waste of resources for ATI to do, because they would be better off using that time and effort to integrate DirectCompute into Bullet and then get developers to use that. The issue, I think, will be cross-platform. Since many PC games are also on consoles, you would need to ensure that adding/removing GPU acceleration for different platforms wouldn't become a problem, since I don't think consoles can do GPU accelerated physics, can they? I don't really know much about console hardware, though.
 
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