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Passive Physx for Gtx 580

You know the problem with physx is the cards need to be roughly equal, and the 580 is rather hot. If you put a slow gpu in as a physx card then it will hold the 580 back and actually reduce your frame rate. Given the cost of high end cards you reach a point where you're better off putting the money into a more powerful cpu and letting that crunch the numbers instead of a second card.

Can't remember which site did a write up on it months back, but the conclusion was for the most part, it wasn't worth it at the top end. Even something like a 8800gt can limit a 4/560.
 
As Azuse said, a passively cooled card will be pretty slow and may actually lower your framerate.


A dedicated Physx card is pretty pointless when used with a 580 to be honest anyway.
 
Actually a dedicated PhysX card isn't pointless with a 580 as even if theres no difference in the recorded framerate I guarantee you it will be noticeably smoother to play compared to rendering and physx on one card (low level stutter).

That said... it is pointless using another card for PhysX at the moment as theres litterally 3 (mainstream) games (Mafia II, Batman and Alice) where you'd notice the difference at thats it.
 
Just to jump on the back of this thread - I've got a 580 and my PhysX selection settings are on Auto-select.

I'm assuming that it will auto-select the 580 however I'm wondering, would it be better to have the CPU to take care of it?
 
With you cpu probably, unless you played excessive amounts of 2/3 games that use it.

While physx was good for a while, it's going the way of hardware accelerated eax. Creative made a fuss when asus pushed out sound cards which did eax as software on the cpu but quads had so much power they could easily hand over 1% for sound effects. Same story with physix these days, which is why pretty much no one works it into their games (despite nvidia throwing money at them).

Your cpu has excessive amounts of power available anyway :)
 
dfarrall said:
No one said that, but you do need one not far below the main. I really wouldnt bother unless your going to invest a fair amount and even then it'd be better to just get another 580
Click to expand...
You are missing the point that the game WILL run smoother on the GTX580 with even just a 9800GT as a dedicated PhysX card than with BOTH the game AND the PhysX running at the same time on the single GTX580.

Not that I'm recommending that the OP should go out of his way to get a dedicated PhysX card, but since he's asking for it one would assume he wants it for playing PhysX games.

For most other people, if they got anything from a old 9800GT up to a GTX460 768MB sitting around, there's no reason not to give it a go to stick them in for playing PhysX titles...and they can always take the card back out once they completed the game.
 
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