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Aegia physx.Should i buy one?
- Thread starter Stas823
- Start date
I played with one last year. You can hack them into action but they are too slow for anything other than Mirror's Edge.
As for adding another GPU? if the GPU you add is slower than the ones you use as your main GPUs it usually ends up slower.
As for adding another GPU? if the GPU you add is slower than the ones you use as your main GPUs it usually ends up slower.
Since they've been bought out by Nvidia, Nvidia cards can be used as standalone PhysX cards. Eg GTX680 for rendering, GTS250 for PhysX. But the cards these days are pretty powerful and don't need a dedicated PhysX card such as your 560Ti, and there aren't many titles that includes PhysX, let alone ones that is stressful enough that requires a dedicated card. So don't bother, best to save the money for a beefier GPU when needed.
It all comes down to how fast your GPU is it seems.
The Physx PPU is a standalone "bolted on" entity on a Geforce card and so it operates with the GPU it is "bolted" to. This means that clock speed and all of the other variables come into play.
It isn't worth spending a red cent on a Physx card unless you own an AMD card and really want it for a select game or two.
Personally I would assume that you are bored and have money to burn, but this isn't the way to spend that money or alleviate your boredom.
sadly not, it was recentley tested and found to cause a slow down on your system. even if you had a seperate 8000 or 9000 series gpu just for your PPU it would actually lower your fps in game with a new gfx card. Stick with whats on-board.
Be better off bunging the £20 in the slot
It will drag down your system terribly.
When I said I had one last year I meant it. Here it is sandwiched between two 3870x2s.
And I can tell you now that firstly it was an absolute nightmare to install because Nvidia block it from the drivers. So you have to hack it around and run GenL's patch and when you are done your scores will be lower. The PPU is something silly like 120mhz. It really is woefully bad.
I paid £12 for one well over a year ago. £20?
As I said. Bored. Either that or just plain daft.
When I said I had one last year I meant it. Here it is sandwiched between two 3870x2s.
And I can tell you now that firstly it was an absolute nightmare to install because Nvidia block it from the drivers. So you have to hack it around and run GenL's patch and when you are done your scores will be lower. The PPU is something silly like 120mhz. It really is woefully bad.
I paid £12 for one well over a year ago. £20?
As I said. Bored. Either that or just plain daft.
Do not buy it, it is no longer powerful enough to do the physx effects in any recent or even semi recent games and I think driver support for it was dropped a long time ago.
Soldato
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No - it would be like adding a 50cc moped engine to a Ferrari and expeciting it to accelerate quicker.
Theres a lot of mis-understanding when its comes to PhysX and especially addin cards.
Right off the bat however the Ageia PPUs are obsolete they've been left behind in the drivers, lack the performance should any game actually use PhysX properly in its current form and lack full support for some of the new hardware features. Its a complete waste of time buying one unless for some reason you want to mess about with old builds of cellfactor.
Next hardware physics isn't about taking the load off the GPU - its about adding more realistic physics to the game on top of what is already there - effects or simulations that are very hard to run on the CPU in realtime if not impossible. A common mistake is people not being able to understand that when you go from CPU PhysX to GPU PhysX it often increases the complexity or fidelity of the effects to and they can't understand why it then runs slower or at the same speed because they don't seem to comprehend that more is now going on than before.
Unless you use an extra GPU thats too slow for the physics workload then in 99% of cases using 1 GPU for rendering and 1 for physics should result in higher performance than using 1 GPU for both rendering and physics - anyone finding results different to that either did it wrong or has some compatibility issue with their setup.
Also even in situations where you have a very fast card doing rendering thats also PhysX capble its often worth having an extra card if you are playing games like Mafia 2, Batman series, etc. as it seems to induce some microstutter into the rendering when doing both on the same card in some cases.
Unfortunatly there are very few games that make use of hardware accelerated physics so for the most part its a waste of time at the moment having an extra dedicated card for it.
Right off the bat however the Ageia PPUs are obsolete they've been left behind in the drivers, lack the performance should any game actually use PhysX properly in its current form and lack full support for some of the new hardware features. Its a complete waste of time buying one unless for some reason you want to mess about with old builds of cellfactor.
Next hardware physics isn't about taking the load off the GPU - its about adding more realistic physics to the game on top of what is already there - effects or simulations that are very hard to run on the CPU in realtime if not impossible. A common mistake is people not being able to understand that when you go from CPU PhysX to GPU PhysX it often increases the complexity or fidelity of the effects to and they can't understand why it then runs slower or at the same speed because they don't seem to comprehend that more is now going on than before.
Unless you use an extra GPU thats too slow for the physics workload then in 99% of cases using 1 GPU for rendering and 1 for physics should result in higher performance than using 1 GPU for both rendering and physics - anyone finding results different to that either did it wrong or has some compatibility issue with their setup.
Also even in situations where you have a very fast card doing rendering thats also PhysX capble its often worth having an extra card if you are playing games like Mafia 2, Batman series, etc. as it seems to induce some microstutter into the rendering when doing both on the same card in some cases.
Unfortunatly there are very few games that make use of hardware accelerated physics so for the most part its a waste of time at the moment having an extra dedicated card for it.
The MHz speed of the PPU isn't really its problem - its just a bunch of fixed function hardware in a massively parallel configuration (most of them doing fairly simple arithmetic but able to handle a much larger workload overall due to the number of side by side pipelines) - so its doesn't need to run as fast as a GPU to do its job - its just been left behind as technology moved on.
nVidia should have launched a standalone PhysX card themselves and allowed it to run in systems with AMD GPUs, as it only hurt the company and the technology to block it. It's now far more likely that we'll see DirectCompute implementations because they are supported on all DX11 cards, which means developers can use physics to affect gameplay without cutting off half the market.
They definitely haven't done themselves any favors with their approach to it - generally you don't need a monster GPU for dedicated hardware physics processing so they could even have potentially made a killing selling cheapish GPUs as dedicated "PhysX ready" cards.