Dedicated physix card

[stevie_vee]

I'm curently using a MSI GTX 580 as my main grafix card. I was wondering...could i use my old MSI GTX 560ti as a dedicated physix card say for Batman Arkam City.

The 560 is starting to gather dust and want to put it good use or sell it. I only bought it last october.

Thanks for any help.

Steve.

 

[tommybhoy]

Yes you could, I would benchmark before and after to see if it's worth the extra fps or not.

 

[cmndr_andi]

Hi there,

So long as your PSU can support both cards and your motherboard has two main PCIE slots then you can run the GTX 560 TI as a PhysX card (it would also be highly recommneded that there is a decent gap between them as the GTX 580 will need a lot of airflow).

However, I wouldn't recommend you go down this route - very few games (Batman being one) actually support this technology and even fewer upcoming games have announced they will use it. Considering you could sell the card for over £100, then I wouldn't recommend passing over the windfall to have it as an underused PhysX card that eats your power and makes you GTX 580 harder to cool.

Perhaps when you play Batman Arkham City you install the GTX 560 Ti and try it both with and without PhysX. It may not be worth £100, but it will likely make one of the few games it properly supports more interesting to play. Then when you are finished the game sell the card

 

[mjones1]

yeah it would work but there is no point in having such a expensive gpu sitting around, I would just sell it.

 

[stevie_vee]

Thanks for the info guys. I have a GTX 470 and a 8800gts 640mb in the spare room too. I should start selling some stuff really.

 

[Sgt Tackleberry]

I remember reading somewhere or watching a video on this, if you a use a Dedicated physix card with a gtx 580 it will make your 580 slow down by a little bit, so it would be best to run the 580 on its own.

 

[Angel_Rex]

fail.

Love my gtx480 bit hit though.....

 

[Frenzy]

I remember reading somewhere or watching a video on this, if you a use a Dedicated physix card with a gtx 580 it will make your 580 slow down by a little bit, so it would be best to run the 580 on its own.

This, you would ideally need another GTX580. Even then you would get more performance out of using both cards fully as physx doesnt utilize much of the card.

 

[Marine-RX179]

I remember reading somewhere or watching a video on this, if you a use a Dedicated physix card with a gtx 580 it will make your 580 slow down by a little bit, so it would be best to run the 580 on its own.

But I also read that running BOTH rendering and Physx off the same card could cause shuttering (probably something to do with both are fighting over GPU power for doing their job), so it is said to be better to have a dedicated PhysX card (provided they are no slower than a 8800GT) and actually have a smoother gameplay experience in physx games, despite the frame rate counter might tell you the frame rate is lower than running the two jobs off a single card.

 

[stevie_vee]

Love my gtx480 bit hit though.....

Sent you a friend request.

 

[ALXAndy]

I did some experiments with this last year using GenL's Physx hack for non Nvidia based primary cards.

In other words; I put a 8800 Ultra next to a pair of 3870x2. Obviously that worked very well, as it enabled Physx where as before it would make the game crawl.

However, during those experiments and write ups I also tested stand alone Physx with a Nvidia based primary card.

I concluded that the Physx PPU/Engine seemed to respond to the card it was connected to. IE - if you have a 580 and used a 560 as a secondary Physx based card the results were mostly worse than just using the 580.

The reason, I concluded logically, was because the PPU seems to go faster with a faster card and or higher clock speed.

So I agree to what some people are saying. All that extra noise and heat and loss on the card for just using it for that are not worth putting up with, sell it.

The only time I could possibly nod my head in appraisal is if you -

1. Love a Physx title as passionately as I love Mirror's Edge.
2. Play it all the time (I had to stop 'cos it hates Win 7 and I have to run 64 bit Win 7 on my rig for the command software to work )
3. Have an AMD/ATI card and want it for the reasons above.

 

[Rroff]

^^ I find that odd you'd see any slowdown using GTX580 (rendering) + GTX560 (physics) over a GTX580 doing both. Now if you had something like a 9800GT that wasn't as capable doing physx then it wouldn't be so suprising.

Regardless in 9/10 cases using a dedicated GPU for physx will be a fair bit smoother than one faster GPU doing both.