HD 4850 with GT 220 for PhysX

[Uriel]

Bought Batman Arkham Assylum and Mirror's Edge recently and fancy enabling a bit of PhysX action. Looked up the unofficial patch for installing an nVIDIA card to run PhysX with ATI and that looks easy enough to work with.

Having looked at some benchmarks the GT 220 seems to do surprisingly well for PhysX - staying within 1-2 frames of a 9600GT.

I guess that makes the GT 220 one of the best bang for buck cards for use as a dedicated PhysX card. Is anyone running this combo? Is anyone running either a GT 220 or 9600GT for PhysX and would care to comment how Batman does with PhysX on high?

I've seen a few people trying to claim that running PhysX with a dedicated card reduces performance. That's clearly not the case. Enabling GPU physX itself reduces performance and having a dedicated card (handy for nVidia - essential for ATi) is often just enough to squeeze performance back into playable territory.

 

[Mr Fujisawa]

I did a bit of research before settling on a gts250, you may find it useful. You can see in the top article the 9400 gives lower performance when using as a dedicated physx.

Ok, after some research:
http://www.egielda.com.pl/?str=art&id=5447-4
Clearly shows that going less that 9800/8800gt is a big mistake, and getting a 9400 gives you WORSE performance.

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/articl...d=138&pageid=4
In this article you can see that using a gtx275 as physx gives you barely better than a gts250 (and by that account, the gts260 will probably be no better). the 250 performs quite a bit better than the 9800GTX.

So, it seems that the GTS250 is a good card for physx, however most of them are dual slot. But, I could probably do with a dual slot one if it's only the fan thats a bit bigger, i could probably still access my mobo ports

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...56&subcat=1402

That seems like it would do the job, and isn't too pricey! I could probably sell my 8800gtx for most of the price of that!

 

[Uriel]

Got hold of a free 8600GTS. Going to try that first before I go spending.

 

[MeMeMeMe]

Let us know how you get on

 

[thebigak]

I am running an overclocked 4870 with a Zotac 9800GT Eco Edition on Windows 7 64bit, Arkham Asylum runs very smoothly at 1080p with 2x AA and max settings. Check out this page for info:

http://physxinfo.com/news/942/hybrid-physx-mod-1-02-195-xx-drivers-and-win-xp-support/

Here is a video guide:

http://physxinfo.com/news/2148/how-to-set-up-hybrid-physx-in-10-minutes-video-guide/

 

[Uriel]

Hmm. 8600GTS isn't being recognised by device manager. I'll have to test the card on its own.

Any other ideas (assuming it's not a dead card)?

 

[Rroff]

Are you on Vista? IIRC you need either XP or Win 7 for multiple GPUs to work.

 

[Lightnix]

I did a bit of research before settling on a gts250, you may find it useful. You can see in the top article the 9400 gives lower performance when using as a dedicated physx.

I have to wonder how in that first link the 9400 GT is besting a QX9650 at 3.8GHz (this is going by their scores with the 4870). It certainly doesn't have any more computational horsepower, it doesn't make any sense.

 

[Uriel]

Are you on Vista? IIRC you need either XP or Win 7 for multiple GPUs to work.

I'm on W7 HP x64

I have to wonder how in that first link the 9400 GT is besting a QX9650 at 3.8GHz (this is going by their scores with the 4870). It certainly doesn't have any more computational horsepower, it doesn't make any sense.

Physx is there for selling nVIDIA GPUs not CPUs. I agree that it doesn't seem to do much that CPUs wouldn't be capable of. When it's running on CPUs, it's clear that the CPU isn't utilised effectively. Sometimes you'll see framerates drop to single figures and the CPU will have less than one core doing anything.

 

[Uriel]

Right - I established that the 8600gts works if I take out the HD4850.

As long as the HD4850 is there the other card isn't recognised. Have tried messing around with setting primary graphics adapter in BIOS, to no avail.

Edit: Nevermind. Swapped the 2 cards round and they're both recognised. My board is x8 x8 anyway so it doesn't matter which is set as primary.

Further Edit: Swapped them back just to test. Very odd. The 8600GTS doesn't seem to be dectected by my motherboard if installed as the secondary card.

 

[Uriel]

OK - I think I'm going to abandon this. All sorts of random stuff is misbehaving. Looks like PhysX with ATi is too much hassle for me.

Edit: 2nd thoughts I didn't uninstall the Radeon drives before moving slots. No wonder I was having problems. Maybe I'll have another crack after all.