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PhysX, CUDA, NV and ATI...help!!!!

Rhezuss

Rhezuss

Diamond Member
We're a few days before the "Fermi" gets out on the shelves and, like many of you i'm sure, I'm shopping around for an upgrade.

Now I read about PhysX and CUDA being "Green" properties that "Red" can not render...

I just need clarifications I guess.

For instance: If a game that uses full PhysX and CUDA and you run it with a HD 5870 and a GTX 480, what will be the results on your screen? Which will look the best?

Am I wrong when I say that running a game that's PhysX and CUDA able with a NVIDIA GPU will look the best?
 
At the moment, PhysX adds some semi-cool physics to a couple games but is by and large in it's infancy. Batman Arcane Asylum is probably the best showing of PhysX and it's value in that game is still up for debate.

CUDA doesn't add graphically to any games as far as I know. It will help speed up some types of encoding and Folding@Home but it is still in it's infancy as well.
 
CUDA is an Nvidia technology that is used for accelerating HD video. IE: The cpu is bypassed and the video card does all the HD playback if it is an 8-series video card or later. ATI and Nvidia cards BOTH have access to DXVA which, when it works, works much better. In the end, NVIDIA is way better for letting me use Cuda because more often then not, CUDA worked, and DXVA just didnt. And the reason isn't nvidia or ATI's fault. Its that the people encoding the files were retarded and didnt know how to insert the DXVA hooks. For some reason, though, the CUDA would just work every time.

But when DXVA does work, its usually about 50-100% more efficient at playing back h.264 or VC-1 video content for me.
 
Games use software-based (CPU-based) physics for core game play. A few titles use hardware-based PhysX to add some effects like swirling leaves or fluttering papers to add a little extra immersion.

CUDA is a GPU-based parallel-processing library that is used for video encoding and scientific apps. It has no effect on gaming. ATI has similar libraries and OpenCL will work with both.

> For instance: If a game that uses full PhysX and CUDA and you run it with a HD 5870 and a GTX 480, what will be the results on your screen? Which will look the best?

That depends on your screen resolution. If you have to lower resolution and other eye candy to free up GPU power for the swirling leaves then the overall image might look worse.

We still don't have any benchmarks to see whether a GTX 480 can run at 19x10 with the same eye candy as the ATI while also doing the extra PhysX stuff.
 
well Just Cause 2 has some Nvidia only graphics features and the developers were saying that was because of CUDA.
 
toyota said:
well Just Cause 2 has some Nvidia only graphics features and the developers were saying that was because of CUDA.
Click to expand...

They probably mean indirectly via PhysX, but it is possible to offload other game-related processing to CUDA if the developer is so inclined.
 
Don't worry i'm not letting anyone trying to sell me a video card with those features, I just want to better understand what it's all about and as I can see, I should not buy my next graphics card based on those features.
 
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