PhysX card to maintain 60 fps?

[BallaTheFeared]

How much raw power is needed to drive 60 fps min (not worried about rendering side) from a PhysX card?

Specifically I'm looking for a card fast enough not to limit me below 60 fps even in the most PhysX'ed out WOW moments when it's taking place an inch from your face.

EVGA B-Stock...

GTX 260 216 core for $40 1 year warranty.

GTX 275 $50 1 year warranty?

Newegg...

GTX 650 Ti $90 2/3 year warranty (MSI)?


How high do I need to go? Needs to probably be at least three times faster than a 9800GT at this specific workload.

 

[blackened23]

Titan for physx!

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Titan costs more than my CPU, Board, RAM, and 7950s combined

 

[escrow4]

Titan costs more than my CPU, Board, RAM, and 7950s combined

That is still hilarious no matter how many times I read it. I paid $1300 (US equivalent $1250) for my Titan here. Seeing as you have AMD cards, don't you have to hack the drivers to enable PhysX on a separate card?

I'd choose a 650Ti minimum for a PhysX card, but even then, how many games really justify that price?

 

[Rvenger]

How about I can give you a good deal on my 780 and you can just discard those radeons.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I'll trade you my 7950s for your 780 straight up

 

[Rvenger]

hmm, I would feel shorted and you will be getting worse performance.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Ironic isn't it? :\

 

[BallaTheFeared]

That is still hilarious no matter how many times I read it. I paid $1300 (US equivalent $1250) for my Titan here. Seeing as you have AMD cards, don't you have to hack the drivers to enable PhysX on a separate card?

I'd choose a 650Ti minimum for a PhysX card, but even then, how many games really justify that price?

Yeah there is a hack, it's not hard or complicated to run it though. It works well for the most part (Hawken won't work because of the online element).

I ordered a PCIe extension ribbon for my board, will confirm everything is gravy with my 9800GT but I already know it's not enough.

$80 isn't that bad, one AAA game at release is $60. Quantity isn't so much as important to me as quality. I like the additional emmerison is provides, I like the visuals, and I generally like the titles it comes packaged with.

I was hoping I'd come across someone using a dedicated card and a decent CF or SLI setup and get some feedback on their experience, I can't seem to find any reviews for this "niche".

 

[DooKey]

I ran a 650Ti with my SLI Titans and it seemed to run BL2 pretty smooth, but you'd expect it with SLI Titans. I wouldn't drop below GTX 650 for a dedicated PhysX card.

 

[Deders]

Newer cards will be much more efficient at PhysX but I'm not sure WOW actually implements Nvidia's hardware accelerated PhysX, not according to this anyway. It may have CPU driven software Physics, maybe even Software PhysX.

Not sure how fair it would be to AMD/Intel users that couldn't run hardware PhysX on a MMORPG.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I ran a 650Ti with my SLI Titans and it seemed to run BL2 pretty smooth, but you'd expect it with SLI Titans. I wouldn't drop below GTX 650 for a dedicated PhysX card.

Had used, have used? Do you still have it, use it?

Any chance you could FRAPS the first boss fight in Borderlands 2 Boom and Bewm without vsync so I can get an idea of how much headroom it has performance wise past 60?

Would be immensely helpful if you could take a couple cannon blasts to the face for me during it

Newer cards will be much more efficient at PhysX but I'm not sure WOW actually implements Nvidia's hardware accelerated PhysX, not according to this anyway. It may have CPU driven software Physics, maybe even Software PhysX.

Not sure how fair it would be to AMD/Intel users that couldn't run hardware PhysX on a MMORPG.

Haha, my bad. I didn't mean "WOW" as in the game

(WoW doesn't use PhysX, not even cpu based)

 

[tviceman]

According to http://alienbabeltech.com/main/an-upgraders-guide-from-8800-gtx-to-gtx-650-ti-boost-pt-2/3/ the gtx650 TI is faster than the gtx280 in all the comparable apples to apples benchmarks (dx10 or dx9). That should translate into faster physx performance.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

What about a used GTX 460? Kind of inefficient though I guess trying to go older.

 

[Keysplayr]

Any Kepler based GPU with 384 CUDA cores or better. So, 650.

 

[Deders]

If I remember correctly Fermi based cards had a 5x increase in performanc eover previous generations (I remember benching games with a 560TI and a 9800GTX+ as a PhysX card and I ended up selling the 9800GTX+), I presume Kepler would only improve on that. Also the latency between the card switching from Physx to normal graphics commands has been reduced significantly to the point where it can all be run on a single card without much issue.

Another factor I noticed even with Hardware Accelerated PhysX is that fps can be improved significantly with decent CPU overclock, especially in Arkham City which was nearly unplayable on my old 560TI with PhysX set to high at stock speeds.

Overclocking by 1GHz made a huge improvement making it very playable with everything turned up to full. Now I have a 670 and it's 60FPS pretty much most of the time on a single card.

Also when I benched my Brother's much newer i5 setup that I built (we both have identical graphics cards), he was getting 90FPs on average at lower MHz than mine.

 

[lavaheadache]

Balla,

About a year ago I was running a GTX 460 Hawk with a pair of Lighting 7970's. Worked out great. I've run hacked Physx before so it was pretty easy to setup. The latest game I played with it though was Batman AC. The 460 was plenty of grunt.

 

[Carfax83]

What about a used GTX 460? Kind of inefficient though I guess trying to go older.

I have a MSI GTX 460 Cyclone for PhysX, and I have no complaints. I bought it used off of eBay to replace my GTS 250 which was struggling in Metro Last Light, and it's handled every PhysX game I have with absolute ease.

As for BL2, the fight with Boom and Bewm resulted in a max load of 40% on my GTX 460 if I recall correctly, so it's not even half way taxed although BL2 PhysX on high is slightly buggy. No PhysX game I have comes close to maxing out the card.

I think your options are the GTX 650 Ti, or the GTX 460. The 260 and 275 aren't fast enough for modern PhysX games, and a GTX 660 would be overkill.. The 460 and 650 Ti should perform similarly for PhysX (with perhaps a slight edge to the 460 as it's a Fermi core), but the 650 Ti will have slightly lower power consumption and probably require only one six pin power connector compared to two six pin connectors with the GTX 460.

Personally, I would go with whatever is cheapest. The GTX 460 is a beast, has tremendous overclocking capability and has a bona fide 256 bit bus with significantly more bandwidth than the 650 Ti. Not sure whether that would affect PhysX performance though.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Nah bandwidth doesn't matter with PhysX, neither does bus or ram capacity.

Is the 650 really that close to the 460 for PhysX? I thought I read Kepler was better at it, but isn't a kepler core closer to .5 a fermi than 1?

There is a 336 460 on ebay with the 192 bus for $85 shipped... I wonder what the difference is in performance, not having to deal with a mail in rebate would be nice... but excessive power usage for little gain not so much!

 

[Deders]

I don't think Physx uses much memory bandwidth, even so the 650TI's increased memory MHz would give it more bandwidth (5400MHz/256*192=4050, about 19% more bandwidth).

Also the 650TI has more than double the shader cores, even though they run at the same speed as the GPU instead of twice as fast like previous generations, even if both cards have the same Instructions Per Clock, the 650 would be 75% faster at calculating PhysX.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

OK yeah so after looking at tviceman's ABT chart it's pretty clear I was confused the first time I looked at it.

The stock 650 Ti seems to be on par with the 460 OC, and the 650 Ti Boost just smokes the 460 OC.

Well now I think that's decided, I thought the 460 was noticeably faster but clearly I've been delusional, and I think a 460 would be more than enough so if this is as fast or faster than yeah good deal.

Thanks for the help, now the bargain hunting begins..,

 

[Carfax83]

I never saw the chart, but after looking at it, it's clear that the 650 Ti is the better PhysX card. Even at stock clocks, it was capable of keeping up with a highly overclocked GTX 460 (they had it at 900mhz)..

 

[Jaydip]

Balla you are playing too much BL2

 

[Deders]

OK yeah so after looking at tviceman's ABT chart....

Don't suppose you have a link? would be interesting to see.

 

[Carfax83]

Don't suppose you have a link? would be interesting to see.

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/an-upgraders-guide-from-8800-gtx-to-gtx-650-ti-boost-pt-2/3/

In BL2, the 650 Ti is barely slower than overclocked GTX 460. I guess it's true that PhysX is unaffected by bandwidth, and relies on clock speed and CUDA core count.

Eventually I'm going to sell my GTX 460 and buy a 650 Ti. The 460 is just too big a card, and it uses two six pin connectors.