Dedicated PhysX Card?

[Xuanne]

Hello everyone.

My first post here, I've been reading these forums for a few months, but never registered till now. I feel you guys are quite knowledgeable in the subject so I thought I'd ask you.

I am planning to get a new build soon, my current build is as follows:
P8 H67 M-LE + i7-2600 (non K)
2x8gb 1866 MHz DDR3 RAM
GTX 670 2gb

I plan to upgrade to:
Z170 based mobo (SLI/CF capable)
i7-6700K
2x8gb 2400 MHz DDR4
GTX 1070/1080

So I was wondering, will my GTX670 be useful as a dedicated PhysX card alongside the GTX 1070/1080? It's still working well (needs some dusting, though) and I don't want it to go to waste. On the other hand, I may be able to get a GTX970 for cheap from a friend who just upgraded to the GTX 1080FE recently, which I guess would also make a good PhysX card?

From what I understand, setting a PhysX card needs to be set in the Nvidia control panel, but does not need an SLI bridge. Do I need to download special driver profiles or something for it?

I currently have a 27" 1080p 60Hz monitor, but I intend to upgrade to 1440p 144Hz or maybe 4K on Black Friday this year.

I'm rambling. Anyway, tldr: as the title says, is a GTX 670 a good PhysX card to run alongside Pascal?

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[Bacon1]

Do you play any games with Phsyx?

 

[Xuanne]

Assassin's Creed, Metro and will probably be getting Fallout 4 soon-ish.

I also do some computer aided design using Autodesk and Solidworks. Maybe it's helpful there too?

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[A_Skywalker]

Can you setup dedicated physx card like gtx 560 with amd card?

 

[Xuanne]

I don't think so, because PhysX is an Nvidia thing.

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[Bacon1]

You could try it, not sure how well it will help. Physx was mostly a showcase piece for Borderlands and Batman. You'd probably be better off selling it for money though or using it in another system.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I remember I was so excited to see what I was missing in batman once I got my first modern Nvidia GPU.

And it was trash. Literally all I was missing was trash blowing around.

 

[Headfoot]

GPU physX is pretty well and dead. Hardly ever shows up any more. Last time I think was Metro Last Light? Most of the time when it does show up its just random debris getting thrown around and a ton of random banners that flap in the wind just cuz.

 

[Tarvaln]

You can do this if you want. You can use almost any card as a dedicated PhysX card. You don't have to have the same chip type as in SLI.

Can you setup dedicated physx card like gtx 560 with amd card?

This use to be possible a few years a go. But I think Nvidia made it impossible now with recent versions of PhysX. http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/...with-latest-physx-and-geforce-285-solved.html

 

[Xuanne]

Ah I see, so it isn't used much anymore. Or is it rolled into Gameworks now? I can't remember.

Guess I'll ask if my dad wants it for the TV or something lol. Thanks.

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[TheRyuu]

Won't using a PhysX card also limit both your PCIe ports to 8x? Honestly I wouldn't bother with it even if that isn't the case. Another thing to keep in mind is that on a 1070/1080 there probably is even less of a performance hit for using PhysX because of some of the new technology on it.

 

[sxr7171]

I've been there and I don't recommend it. It's a waste of time.

 

[sxr7171]

GPU physX is pretty well and dead. Hardly ever shows up any more. Last time I think was Metro Last Light? Most of the time when it does show up its just random debris getting thrown around and a ton of random banners that flap in the wind just cuz.

AC Black flag as far as I know. Just created more smoky smoke.

 

[SPBHM]

I thought someone bumped a thread from 2009 or something

using a dedicated physx card seems pretty useless, almost no game uses GPU accelerated physx anymore and for the few that use I think a current single geforce can handle it well enough.

seems like a waste of slot/space/power more than anything with a 1080/1070 which can probably run the games that use GPU physx alone with pretty high performance (which are all old games as far as I know anyway)

 

[Xuanne]

Why did it fall out of favor though? Isn't having realistic-ish physics in a game a good thing? Or is it handled by Havok or something nowadays?

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[Deders]

I was thinking of doing the same thing when I got my 1080, it was a toss up between using a 780 with lots of cores, or a 750TI with fewer but better optimised faster cores.

I was leaning towards the 750TI but then I remembered that the 1080's cores will be running at near 2GHz (when overclocked), and that the Dynamic Load Balancing in this later generation means that it would no longer partition off a section of the card to handle PhysX and other compute calculations like Hairworks etc, it's possible that an add in card might slow things down.

I'm going to test both scenarios when I get a chance.

My thinking at the moment is if the ray trace based audio takes off in games, the Pascal cards are probably going to be the only ones to support it, and it may be worth getting a small pascal card with the higher shader speeds that can keep up with my main card, but only after I upgrade my monitor to a 34" ultrawide.

 

[NTMBK]

It's really not worth the drop in PCIe bandwidth and the extra power consumption. I'd recommend selling the 670 at a fair price to a friend/family member- surely you have some teenager cousin or something who'd kill for a nice 670

 

[Deders]

GPU physX is pretty well and dead. Hardly ever shows up any more. Last time I think was Metro Last Light? Most of the time when it does show up its just random debris getting thrown around and a ton of random banners that flap in the wind just cuz.

Arkham Knight uses PhysX far more intensely than either of the metro games.

Also it's not just PhysX that could benefit from an add in card, many gameworks features use compute calculations, as would the VR Audio.

On older generations, a portion of the GPU is partitioned off to handle these things which is why framerates drop by the same percentage when these features are enabled, no matter how intense the effects are or how low you set their sliders.

Whilst a dedicated card would be a good solution for offloading these kinds of calculations, freeing up the main card to deal with rendering, we've yet to really see how the new dynamic load balancer in Pascal cards affects games with these effects because review sites insist on doing all their benchmarks with these features turned off.

I understand why, apples to apples, but they could add in a section that benchmarks just Nvidia cards with effects on and off.

It's really not worth the drop in PCIe bandwidth and the extra power consumption. I'd recommend selling the 670 at a fair price to a friend/family member- surely you have some teenager cousin or something who'd kill for a nice 670

If I were to put a dedicated compute card, I'd most likely use one of the motherboard's 4x PCIe lanes as the bandwidth needed for PhysX etc is much smaller than the main rendering side of things that includes massive amounts of texture data.

 

[Xuanne]

It's really not worth the drop in PCIe bandwidth and the extra power consumption. I'd recommend selling the 670 at a fair price to a friend/family member- surely you have some teenager cousin or something who'd kill for a nice 670

My cousins don't game much, if at all, heh. And it's hard justifying a 2nd hand 670 with RX 460 on the horizon. Thanks for the input though.

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[jabroni619]

I was thinking of doing the same thing when I got my 1080, it was a toss up between using a 780 with lots of cores, or a 750TI with fewer but better optimised faster cores.

I was leaning towards the 750TI but then I remembered that the 1080's cores will be running at near 2GHz (when overclocked), and that the Dynamic Load Balancing in this later generation means that it would no longer partition off a section of the card to handle PhysX and other compute calculations like Hairworks etc, it's possible that an add in card might slow things down.

I'm going to test both scenarios when I get a chance.

My thinking at the moment is if the ray trace based audio takes off in games, the Pascal cards are probably going to be the only ones to support it, and it may be worth getting a small pascal card with the higher shader speeds that can keep up with my main card, but only after I upgrade my monitor to a 34" ultrawide.

In my own testing with a dedicated Physx card, I found that the maximum frame rate increased. The average frame rate was either identical or better by a couple fps. Minimums were lower. I think this is due to increased latency caused by having to process PhysX on a separate GPU and send that data back through the PCIe bus vs doing everything on the same GPU. In the end, i removed the Physx card.

 

[Deders]

In my own testing with a dedicated Physx card, I found that the maximum frame rate increased. The average frame rate was either identical or better by a couple fps. Minimums were lower. I think this is due to increased latency caused by having to process PhysX on a separate GPU and send that data back through the PCIe bus vs doing everything on the same GPU. In the end, i removed the Physx card.

Which cards were you using and what games did you test?

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Why did it fall out of favor though? Isn't having realistic-ish physics in a game a good thing? Or is it handled by Havok or something nowadays?

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Not an expert but I'll try. Basically physics in games is a good idea but both popular/available methods are owned by AMD or NVIDIA and neither makes it easy to work on the others cards. This makes something that is nice to have more difficult because the market is cut in half.
Watch so YouTube videos most of the time its very minor improvements I wouldn't bother with a second card for the results.
Maybe someday they'll agree to an open standard and we'll see good improvements to games. Until then its just a feature to attract sales.

 

[Deders]

I didn't think AMD had propriatry hardware physX

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I didn't think AMD had propriatry hardware physX

They didn't they al least tried but I believe their solution is far from ideal too.

 

[Xuanne]

Not an expert but I'll try. Basically physics in games is a good idea but both popular/available methods are owned by AMD or NVIDIA and neither makes it easy to work on the others cards. This makes something that is nice to have more difficult because the market is cut in half.
Watch so YouTube videos most of the time its very minor improvements I wouldn't bother with a second card for the results.
Maybe someday they'll agree to an open standard and we'll see good improvements to games. Until then its just a feature to attract sales.

Oh, that sucks :/

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