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Graphics for Physx

Ch3m1c4L

Ch3m1c4L

Ch3m1c4L

Soldato
Joined
11 Oct 2007
Posts
3,242
Location
London, UK
I'm thinking of picking up a card to use for physx, since i have a spare slot and may as well. What sort of card would I need? Would an 8800gt suffice or should I be looking at more like a 9800 or a 260 to get the best performance? Obviously cba with buying a 3rd 280 just for physics since that would be better used for graphics.

Or does no-one really know until the 180's are released and every benches them?
 
I don't think anyone really knows at the moment but you could look at something like folding at home benchmarks for relative cuda performance over using the cpu.

Anything with 32 shaders has similar performance to a top range cpu (I think?) So even a cheepo card might be worth it to take load of the cpu. Although going to a 9600gt, 8800gs/gt etc makes a huge difference in performance.

If your desperate for a card for now the 256mb 8800gt for less than ?50 is a good bet. :) A g200 card will be overkill as Physx is unlikly to require (or even use) cuda compute capability 1.3.
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AFAIK SLI+PhysX isn't supported in drivers yet - but will be in the future. Tbf, SLI 280s will handle PhysX as well as the game easily.
 
I know its not supported yet, but the 180 drivers gives the ability to put physx on a dedicated card, which should be completly seperate from SLI and as such, should be supported.
Its more for the fact that I dont want to lose any FPS in high spec games to the fact that I have physx running, or to have to make the choice of not running it. Currently decideding between a XFX OCed 9800gt for £113 or a own brand 9800GTX+ for 117 (cooler looks bad and its got a dual slot backing plate, which means ill need to swap tht for one on a different card so itll fit).
 
I guess it depends on the games implementation of Physx but currently most cuda applications are memory bandwidth limited! I think the amount of on board memory is unlikey to hinder performance like it would with rendering the gfx so I stand by my 8800gt choice :)

its a shame there are no high spec games which would need this power though.. as boogle and wizardskills say a single g200 card has enough power to do it all atm.

oh, it's worth noting the vantage physics test is completly pointless.... maybe if it was running while the gpu is rendering the jane nash/new calico tests? can you imagine running crysis level graphics and trying to do phsyx calculations at the same time? no? :d
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thats what i was thinking about, yes sli 280s are good, but running crysis at 2560 when they are doing physics as well.....
 
Ive got an 8600GT sat here for physx, not gonna put it in until the drivers are out tho. I think anything else would be an overkill otherwise id get that £46 8800GT
 
ok, I meant something like crysis, where its already straining the GPU's through either bad coding or too high effects. If a game is already running at like 35-40 i dont want to lose too many fps's to physics.
Regardless of why, still need to know if SLI + seperate card for physx is supported.
All I can find out is either, both on one card, one card for each, or sli with both cards doing both things.
 
Ch3m1c4L said:
ok, I meant something like crysis, where its already straining the GPU's through either bad coding or too high effects. If a game is already running at like 35-40 i dont want to lose too many fps's to physics.
Regardless of why, still need to know if SLI + seperate card for physx is supported.
All I can find out is either, both on one card, one card for each, or sli with both cards doing both things.
Click to expand...

Thats the 3 options you have at the moment, i dont think there is an option for SLI + physx card
 
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I have an 8800GTS 512 as my main card and use an 8800GTS 320 in a second slot for Physix, but as no real games use this at the moment, cant see it being worry for some time.
 
Yeah im sure you can already have 2x cards, 1x doing PhysX and one doing the rendering now, as you just select which one you want to use for the PhsyX, but as above, its pointless with nothing much using it yet.
 
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Metalface Mark said:
Why dont you just get an actual physx card, you can get second hand ones pretty cheap.
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because even a cheap GPU completely owns it performance wise...

With this generation of games and even probably the next theres no real point to having a dedicated GPU for physics especially if you have 280 SLI as the cards are perfectly capable of doing both rendering and physx at a decent performance level. The beauty of cuda/physx is that it can do quite a bit of its work in "spare capacity" that the GPU can NOT re-use for rendering and would otherwise be sitting idle - and with an SLI setup that amount of "spare capacity" is quite a bit increased over a single card.
 
Rroff said:
because even a cheap GPU completely owns it performance wise...

With this generation of games and even probably the next theres no real point to having a dedicated GPU for physics especially if you have 280 SLI as the cards are perfectly capable of doing both rendering and physx at a decent performance level. The beauty of cuda/physx is that it can do quite a bit of its work in "spare capacity" that the GPU can NOT re-use for rendering and would otherwise be sitting idle - and with an SLI setup that amount of "spare capacity" is quite a bit increased over a single card.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, the peeps at NVIDIA have not yet ported rigid body simulations from the PhysX API so that they run on the CUDA based GPU implementation. This means that while your GPU can accelerate PhysX cloth and particle scenes (that have less than 4000 actors) it cannot do anything with rigid bodies, they are pased back to the CPU.

For this reason alone, the PhysX PPU is still a viable alternative if you are bothered about offloading PhysX calculations from the CPU to something else.

Supposedly rigid body stuff will make it into the CUDA based GPU implementation sometime early next year, though no hard timescale has been set.
 
UKDTweak said:
I have an 8800GTS 512 as my main card and use an 8800GTS 320 in a second slot for Physix, but as no real games use this at the moment, cant see it being worry for some time.
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Well as you own a P35 board that answers my, will it work on a P35 board question :)
 
LoadsaMoney said:
Thats SLi2 which is coming, but don't know when.

EDIT: Its only for 3x cards though, 2x in SLi + 1x doing the PhysX, so your going to need a 3x slot board.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9660&Itemid=1
Click to expand...

I'm only considering this as an option because I have a third slot sitting empty on my board, and I have too much money and im trying to find SOMETHING to spend it on that is more worthwhile than beer. I already have savings and stuff so meh....Think I will just get the 28" HannsG monitor when the forceware 180's come out instead then :D

Thanks everyone.
 
oh yea, just got this back from nvidia. I sent this:
"I am currently running SLI GTX280's and am wondering if it would be possible to add a third GPU (9800GT ot GTX+)and use it as a dedicated PhysX processor. I know the three modes that are currently supported but can't find any information on this anywhere. If its not available now, is it likely to be enabled in the Forceware 180 "Big Bang II" driver update?"

"Hello Tom,

The configuration you seek is not supported by NVIDIA. Unfortunately, there is no information as to if or when this would be supported in the future. Thanks for your interest in NVIDIA technology.

Best Regards,
Troy
NVIDIA Customer Care"
 
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