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2nd card for PhysX? Don't understand

Modjo

Modjo

Modjo

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Hi all. Have just read a thead regarding upgrading from an 8600 or 8800GTs to a 48xx. it was suggested that they keep their old card for PhysX. I've heard of PhysX and have it on my pc (I think). What's it for and would I benefit whaen I upgrade my gfx card? :confused:
 
It's physics processing (working out where boxes fly etc) but on your Nvidia 8 series or higher graphics card. You can use your old graphics card as a physics processor for this purpose.
 
Just have both cards installed, say your 8800GTX for GFX and your 8600GT for PhysX. The drivers allow you to pick which card does the physx.

You cant do this with ATI cards you have to have nvidia, 8 series and above
 
is the physX as demanding? for example if you had a 8800 gtx set as a physX card would it perform better than a 8600gt?
 
"The drivers allow you to pick which card does the physx."
There is another setting which might be better. Both cards do graphics and PhysX. Not to sure I like the idea of 1 card doing graphics and one PhysX.
 
Pottsey said:
"The drivers allow you to pick which card does the physx."
There is another setting which might be better. Both cards do graphics and PhysX. Not to sure I like the idea of 1 card doing graphics and one PhysX.
Click to expand...

Having said that I think he'd have some difficulty SLi-ing an 8600GT with an 8800GTX.
 
If you have 2 identical cards you can run them in SLI and have them do physics processing as well yes... but not with 2 different cards.
 
Rroff said:
If you have 2 identical cards you can run them in SLI and have them do physics processing as well yes... but not with 2 different cards.
Click to expand...

Yes.
But, with two different cards you can still plug them both in, use the faster one as the gfx card and dedicate the other one to run pure physx....no monitor plugged in, no SLI link. Should even work on an Xfire board.

However.......
Before you get all excited, apart from some nice demo's, some poor UT3 levels, and 3dmarkVantage, you'll not see it do too much. It'll only work in games set to use the physx system. Having said that, this new ability to dedicate spare stream processors/cards to physx, without the need for a specialist card, will doubtless see the take-up and support of the protocol rise considerably over the coming months.
 
If you have 2 nvidia cards the same on an SLI mobo you can choose SLi-PhysX which means both cards render graphics and process physics, or you can choose to set one of them as dedicated physics while the main one does the graphics (SLi disabled)

If you have two different cards, you can use ANY mobo and ANY 8series or higher card as a dedicated PhysX card alongside your main display driver, they don't have to be linked together in any way.

One of my GTX280's died on me the other day so I put my old 8800GTX back in for a PPD boost while folding and for PhysX. I havent tested it in games yet but I will be doing so over the weekend until I get my replacement 280. Getting over 12000 PPD now though lol.

It's not as simple as just plugging it in either, you need to connect a display cable to your secondary card and to a monitor and extend your desktop to it to get the PhysX driver to recognise it.

Physics are already becoming a bigger part of games and PhysX will become more and more common by the end of this year and beyond. 2 of the most widely used game engines now have it written into their code with many more stating they will follow suit, i.e probably most games that display the nvidia logo at the start will be coded for it I'd think.
 
Last edited:
jarvo1 said:
It's not as simple as just plugging it in either, you need to connect a display cable to your secondary card and to a monitor and extend your desktop to it to get the PhysX driver to recognise it.
Click to expand...

Pants I didn't know that, dual monitors only :(

Gotta be a fix coming down the pipeline for that though.
 
"It's not as simple as just plugging it in either, you need to connect a display cable to your secondary card and to a monitor and extend your desktop to it to get the PhysX driver to recognise it."
From what I can tell thats only a driver bug in Vista. The XP drivers dont have that problem.
 
Yeah only Vista needs the 2nd display connected, so if you don't have one, and you don't have a 2nd card for PhsyX, then get your wallets oot, so much for free PhysX eh, as 2nd screens and cards aint free are they. :p
 
yeah sorry, forgot to mention that was only in Vista. If your monitor has a secondary input, you can just use that instead of another monitor. The R180 release in September is supposed to include support for multi-monitor displays while using SLi so I'm hoping that will fix this bug and hopefully allow for a dedicated PhysX card alongside SLi display cards.
 
So could you have say a pair of 8's in SLI and a third 8 set to do the physics.
Maybe something to experiment with at the weekend.
 
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