Seperate Cards for PhysX?

[Henrah]

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: Corporate Thug
Not to thread jack, but can a Nvidia card be used as a physX card while an ATi card is used as the primary? I want to get a 4890 and I have a 8800GT (which has low resale value) so I was thinking of using as a dedicated PhysX

On Windows XP and Windows 7, Yes.
On Vista, No.

Why is that a no on Vista?

^_^

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: Henrah

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: Corporate Thug
Not to thread jack, but can a Nvidia card be used as a physX card while an ATi card is used as the primary? I want to get a 4890 and I have a 8800GT (which has low resale value) so I was thinking of using as a dedicated PhysX

On Windows XP and Windows 7, Yes.
On Vista, No.

Why is that a no on Vista?

^_^

Vista lacks the appropriate driver infrastructure to run simultaneous different drivers, they brought that back with Win7.

 

[Henrah]

Thanks Sylvanas ^_^

 

[Genx87]

Too bad my 8800 GTS died

Ill grab the next gen video card from Nvidia in the Fall. Then the next time I upgrade use that strictly for physics calculations.

 

[vj8usa]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Too bad my 8800 GTS died

Ill grab the next gen video card from Nvidia in the Fall. Then the next time I upgrade use that strictly for physics calculations.

That'd probably be a waste of money/electricity though. You could just resell the card when you upgrade, and buy something like a 9600 for PhysX. Even with an 8800GT, you should be able to get some money back by selling it and buying a 9600/8400/etc (which would also use less power).

 

[imported_Shaq]

Hopefully I am not bumping this thread too late but I just ran the Cryostasis Tech Demo with a 295 and a 260 for PhysX.

At 1920x1080 on High settings and sound on I get a 90 FPS avg.! 44 min and 184 max.

With just the 295 I get a 62 FPS avg. 36 min. and 184 max.

The difference is huge seeing it in motion. It actually runs too fast with the extra PhysX card because the animations aren't locked. lol

Edit: For some reason you have to hook up the PhysX card to a monitor and enable the display for the PhysX card to work. If the card is already enabled to use PhysX in the control panel you have to move it to your primary card, enable the secondary display and then reenable PhysX for your PhysX card. Then the secondary display can be disabled and it will still work. It took me forever to figure that out as last year Nvidia stated you didn't need to do this anymore. Obviously some of us do. This is in Windows 7 186.18 drivers BTW.

 

[BFG10K]

The actual game runs nothing like the tech demo though. Even with PhysX disabled it crawls on a GTX285 at 1680x1050 with no AA.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Question: do you need an SLI board to run a dedicated physx card? In other words, if I have 2x PCIe slots but cannot do physx on the board can I grab a cheap card for physx and pop it in?

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Question: do you need an SLI board to run a dedicated physx card?
No


In other words, if I have 2x PCIe slots but cannot do physx on the board
You have a GTX295. So, unsure what you meant by this. Did you mean cannot do SLI on the board?


can I grab a cheap card for physx and pop it in?
Yes.

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: Shaq
Edit: For some reason you have to hook up the PhysX card to a monitor and enable the display for the PhysX card to work.

That's crap...hopefully it's just a bug. What if someone doesn't have another monitor?

 

[Keysplayr]

Have you tried the new WHQL drivers for Win7?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/w...32bit_190.62_whql.html

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Question: do you need an SLI board to run a dedicated physx card?
No


In other words, if I have 2x PCIe slots but cannot do physx on the board
You have a GTX295. So, unsure what you meant by this. Did you mean cannot do SLI on the board?


can I grab a cheap card for physx and pop it in?
Yes.

Well, yes I meant SLI but was thinking in my head physx...my bad.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Question: do you need an SLI board to run a dedicated physx card?
No


In other words, if I have 2x PCIe slots but cannot do physx on the board
You have a GTX295. So, unsure what you meant by this. Did you mean cannot do SLI on the board?


can I grab a cheap card for physx and pop it in?
Yes.

Well, yes I meant SLI but was thinking in my head physx...my bad.

Ok, you can add a card for PhysX. Minimum requirement (unless it has changed with new drivers that are out) is a 8 series or better 32 shader 256MB GPU to be able to dedicate PhysX to the card. If you use anything less, PhysX will default to the GTX295. So minimum GPUs are:

8 series: 8600GT
9 series: 9500GT

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Question: do you need an SLI board to run a dedicated physx card?
No


In other words, if I have 2x PCIe slots but cannot do physx on the board
You have a GTX295. So, unsure what you meant by this. Did you mean cannot do SLI on the board?


can I grab a cheap card for physx and pop it in?
Yes.

Well, yes I meant SLI but was thinking in my head physx...my bad.

Ok, you can add a card for PhysX. Minimum requirement (unless it has changed with new drivers that are out) is a 8 series or better 32 shader 256MB GPU to be able to dedicate PhysX to the card. If you use anything less, PhysX will default to the GTX295. So minimum GPUs are:

8 series: 8600GT
9 series: 9500GT

I thought you used an 8400gs, which has just 16SP, for physx and had like a 60% improvement in Cryostasis over using just the gtx295? that just doesnt make any sense or sound logical to me but thats what you said earlier in this thread.

 

[thilanliyan]

nm

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: toyota

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Question: do you need an SLI board to run a dedicated physx card?
No


In other words, if I have 2x PCIe slots but cannot do physx on the board
You have a GTX295. So, unsure what you meant by this. Did you mean cannot do SLI on the board?


can I grab a cheap card for physx and pop it in?
Yes.

Well, yes I meant SLI but was thinking in my head physx...my bad.

Ok, you can add a card for PhysX. Minimum requirement (unless it has changed with new drivers that are out) is a 8 series or better 32 shader 256MB GPU to be able to dedicate PhysX to the card. If you use anything less, PhysX will default to the GTX295. So minimum GPUs are:

8 series: 8600GT
9 series: 9500GT

I thought you used an 8400gs, which has just 16SP, for physx and had like a 60% improvement in Cryostasis over using just the gtx295? that just doesnt make any sense or sound logical to me but thats what you said earlier in this thread.

You are correct that I said it earlier in this thread. July 3rd. And that also coincided with pre- 190 series drivers. Since the debut of the 190 series drivers, the 16sp 8400GS no longer runs PhysX nor can I make it run PhysX. So, I switched in an 8600GT which works fine. 32sp is the lower limit to be able to run PhysX. Either dedicated or primary, since the launch of the 190 series drivers. I can still use the eldest 180 series drivers if I want to use PhysX on the 8400GS. But I don't want to be stuck with the 180s forever.

Make sense now?

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: toyota

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Question: do you need an SLI board to run a dedicated physx card?
No


In other words, if I have 2x PCIe slots but cannot do physx on the board
You have a GTX295. So, unsure what you meant by this. Did you mean cannot do SLI on the board?


can I grab a cheap card for physx and pop it in?
Yes.

Well, yes I meant SLI but was thinking in my head physx...my bad.

Ok, you can add a card for PhysX. Minimum requirement (unless it has changed with new drivers that are out) is a 8 series or better 32 shader 256MB GPU to be able to dedicate PhysX to the card. If you use anything less, PhysX will default to the GTX295. So minimum GPUs are:

8 series: 8600GT
9 series: 9500GT

I thought you used an 8400gs, which has just 16SP, for physx and had like a 60% improvement in Cryostasis over using just the gtx295? that just doesnt make any sense or sound logical to me but thats what you said earlier in this thread.

You are correct that I said it earlier in this thread. And that also coincided with pre- 190 series drivers. Since the debut of the 190 series drivers, the 16sp 8400GS no longer runs PhysX nor can I make it run PhysX. So, I switched in an 8600GT which works fine. 32sp is the lower limit to be able to run PhysX. Either dedicated or primary, since the launch of the 190 series drivers. I can still use the eldest 180 series drivers if I want to use PhysX on the 8400GS. But I don't want to be stuck with the 180s forever.

Make sense now?

well yes and no. lol. I just dont understand how such a weak card could give such an enormous boost for physx. how did 16SP 8400gs add 60% better performance to a system that already had 480SP? I cant even imagine any card giving that much of a boost let alone one that weak. also months ago I remember someone running physx benchmarks actually got lower performance by using an 8600gt for physx instead of using a gtx260 to do both graphics and physx. I thought the conclusion has been that a 9600gt is really the "real world" minimum with the 9800gt being strongly suggested.

 

[Qbah]

Originally posted by: toyota
well yes and no. lol. I just dont understand how such a weak card could give such an enormous boost for physx. how did 16SP 8400gs add 60% better performance to a system that already had 480SP? I cant even imagine any card giving that much of a boost let alone one that weak. also months ago I remember someone running physx benchmarks actually got lower performance by using an 8600gt for physx instead of using a gtx260 to do both graphics and physx. I thought the conclusion has been that a 9600gt is really the "real world" minimum with the 9800gt being strongly suggested.

Perhaps when the GTX295 was working on both, "half" of the card was used as the rendering one and the other "half" as a PhysX card? As in one chip on PhysX and the other on 3D. Once he popped in a 8400GS, both "halves" were working on 3D in SLi and the 8400GS was doing PhysX, thus not breaking SLi. The 60% looks pretty much like multi-GPU scaling (on the lower side).

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: Qbah

Originally posted by: toyota
well yes and no. lol. I just dont understand how such a weak card could give such an enormous boost for physx. how did 16SP 8400gs add 60% better performance to a system that already had 480SP? I cant even imagine any card giving that much of a boost let alone one that weak. also months ago I remember someone running physx benchmarks actually got lower performance by using an 8600gt for physx instead of using a gtx260 to do both graphics and physx. I thought the conclusion has been that a 9600gt is really the "real world" minimum with the 9800gt being strongly suggested.

Perhaps when the GTX295 was working on both, "half" of the card was used as the rendering one and the other "half" as a PhysX card? As in one chip on PhysX and the other on 3D. Once he popped in a 8400GS, both "halves" were working on 3D in SLi and the 8400GS was doing PhysX, thus not breaking SLi. The 60% looks pretty much like multi-GPU scaling (on the lower side).

I guess that make sense then.

I really want to see some current benchmarks with an 8600gt being used as physx with high end single gpu such as a gtx260 or faster. I have an 8600gt that I could use for physx but I dont really want to pull it from the other pc and go through all the trouble for little to no gain or even worse a loss in performance.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I just installed a 9600gt as a physx card. here's my problem or my question. How come I went from 45fps average in cryostasis with just a GTX295 to 77fps average, yet I lose 4k points on 3Dmark and when looking at the results side by side I noticed the physx portion of the test was almost 1/2 what it was before. Am I to assume that 3D Mark is simply forcing multiple calculations on the card and not doing any real 3D work to simply get a max number of calculations per second, thus the GTX295 being set as the physx card would be superior in this test while a game that is rendering textures, lighting and geometry etc would benefit from offloading the Physx work?

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
I just installed a 9600gt as a physx card. here's my problem or my question. How come I went from 45fps average in cryostasis with just a GTX295 to 77fps average, yet I lose 4k points on 3Dmark and when looking at the results side by side I noticed the physx portion of the test was almost 1/2 what it was before. Am I to assume that 3D Mark is simply forcing multiple calculations on the card and not doing any real 3D work to simply get a max number of calculations per second, thus the GTX295 being set as the physx card would be superior in this test while a game that is rendering textures, lighting and geometry etc would benefit from offloading the Physx work?

I was speculating about this with Apoppin the other day. It is possible, that PhysX steals memory, memory bandwidth, and memory controller cycles when run on the primary card.

Offloading PhysX to another card that has it's own resources to draw from seems to be the best method for the most performance in PhysX games. While a single higher end card can handle PhysX pretty well, the reason for the rather large jump in performance "could" be as stated above. That could be why a 16sp 8400GS offered so much performance gain. At the same time, we are freeing up valuable resources on the primary card, and granted even more in the form of a dedicated PhysX card. So, it doesn't appear that PhysX is all that shader hungry, but it does "appear" to be bandwidth (memory) hungry. Thus the 256MB minimum requirement for any given PhysX capable card.

This is just a theory, I really have no info yet. I was going to configure some sort of testing on this. Just have to figure out how, and what to do.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
I just installed a 9600gt as a physx card. here's my problem or my question. How come I went from 45fps average in cryostasis with just a GTX295 to 77fps average, yet I lose 4k points on 3Dmark and when looking at the results side by side I noticed the physx portion of the test was almost 1/2 what it was before. Am I to assume that 3D Mark is simply forcing multiple calculations on the card and not doing any real 3D work to simply get a max number of calculations per second, thus the GTX295 being set as the physx card would be superior in this test while a game that is rendering textures, lighting and geometry etc would benefit from offloading the Physx work?

I was speculating about this with Apoppin the other day. It is possible, that PhysX steals memory, memory bandwidth, and memory controller cycles when run on the primary card.

Offloading PhysX to another card that has it's own resources to draw from seems to be the best method for the most performance in PhysX games. While a single higher end card can handle PhysX pretty well, the reason for the rather large jump in performance "could" be as stated above. That could be why a 16sp 8400GS offered so much performance gain. At the same time, we are freeing up valuable resources on the primary card, and granted even more in the form of a dedicated PhysX card. So, it doesn't appear that PhysX is all that shader hungry, but it does "appear" to be bandwidth (memory) hungry. Thus the 256MB minimum requirement for any given PhysX capable card.

This is just a theory, I really have no info yet. I was going to configure some sort of testing on this. Just have to figure out how, and what to do.

i'd be glad to help; it is an easy test to set up, but your PMs are set to ignore me


ANYway, the 2nd card does wonders for FPS in Cryostasis demo; i am using GTX 280 + 8800-GTX

in testing that configuration in Vantage, the score only drops a little bit (GeForce 186.18):
- with a single GTX 280 = 13046
- with GTX 280 + 8800 GTX = 12867

The FPS are the same in the mini-games

 

[lavaheadache]

I just want to add to the disscussion here a bit.... I find that using a dedicated card for phsyx helps tremedously even at lower resolutions. I've played through Cryostasis and Mirrors edge with the 8800gs and 9600gt resppectively. Both seemed to "require" the add on card for smooth game play. I get random jerkyness and much slow performance without a physx card. Cryostasis is unplayable at 1920x1200 no AA without the 8800gs and likewise Mirrors Edge is unplayable (less than 40FPS in a lot of areas) at 1920X1200 4xAA.

I care not to read back to find who was saying that an Add on card is worthless but that statement is completely false. Sure you can get by without one but why would you want to just get by? Eye candy can use all the power you can throw at it.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
I just installed a 9600gt as a physx card. here's my problem or my question. How come I went from 45fps average in cryostasis with just a GTX295 to 77fps average, yet I lose 4k points on 3Dmark and when looking at the results side by side I noticed the physx portion of the test was almost 1/2 what it was before. Am I to assume that 3D Mark is simply forcing multiple calculations on the card and not doing any real 3D work to simply get a max number of calculations per second, thus the GTX295 being set as the physx card would be superior in this test while a game that is rendering textures, lighting and geometry etc would benefit from offloading the Physx work?

I was speculating about this with Apoppin the other day. It is possible, that PhysX steals memory, memory bandwidth, and memory controller cycles when run on the primary card.

Offloading PhysX to another card that has it's own resources to draw from seems to be the best method for the most performance in PhysX games. While a single higher end card can handle PhysX pretty well, the reason for the rather large jump in performance "could" be as stated above. That could be why a 16sp 8400GS offered so much performance gain. At the same time, we are freeing up valuable resources on the primary card, and granted even more in the form of a dedicated PhysX card. So, it doesn't appear that PhysX is all that shader hungry, but it does "appear" to be bandwidth (memory) hungry. Thus the 256MB minimum requirement for any given PhysX capable card.

This is just a theory, I really have no info yet. I was going to configure some sort of testing on this. Just have to figure out how, and what to do.

i'd be glad to help; it is an easy test to set up, but your PMs are set to ignore me


ANYway, the 2nd card does wonders for FPS in Cryostasis demo; i am using GTX 280 + 8800-GTX

in testing that configuration in Vantage, the score only drops a little bit (GeForce 186.18):
- with a single GTX 280 = 13046
- with GTX 280 + 8800 GTX = 12867

The FPS are the same in the mini-games

I went from ~22k with a GTX295 only to ~19k with a 9600GT doing physx in 3dmark vantage. Games show vast improvements ranging from 10-40fps depending on game and scene.

 

[imported_Shaq]

Windows 7 x64 is even worse than x86. I have to keep the secondary display enabled in the drivers for it to work. With x86 you set it up and then the display can be disabled. My monitor has a VGA and DVI input so it isn't much of a hassle. I haven't tried newer drivers than 186.18 yet as these seem to be the best drivers overall.

Here is a thread testing different cards for PhysX and there is an improvement with the GTX 200 series over the 8 and 9 series. It is only using the Cryostasis tech demo though so it may not be this way for every game.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1420948

I thought about selling the 260 and getting a 9600/9800GT but based on those results I may just keep it. And the Batman demo suggests a 9800GTX/GTS 250 with high PhysX so in another year there may be a game that needs a 200 series GTX for PhysX.

The game (Cryostasis) plays much better with the PhysX enabled. With just 260 SLI if I broke two sets of icicles the framerate dropped in the teens. Now with the PhysX card there is a drop of less than 10% and I haven't seen the framerate drop less than 30 yet and it is generally over 45. This is at 1920x1080 with everything on and high except medium shadows, AF is off, and caustics is off. High shadows, Caustics and AF drop the framerate almost in half so it isn't worth it.