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Phys-x?
- Thread starter Glaucus
- Start date
You can but only in Windows 7 i think.
Alternativly you can get one of the original agaia physx cards
saying that it might not fit as I have two HD4870S in my comp, saying that isnt Nvida supposed to be "helping" AMD put thier physics into thier cards ? o.O
You can't do it on Vista but XP and Win7 will let you use an ATI card as the primary rendering device and an nVidia 8 series of higher as the physx processing card...
Ideally you want a 9600GT or higher, 9500GT just about does, anything lower isn't going to help much.
At the moment theres only a small handful of games that really use it much and none of them use it that ground breakingly... it does add a few nice touches to mirrors edge but nothing you can't live without.
Performance wise running it on the CPU with an ATI card as primary in a game that uses physx moderatly the difference is you'd be getting ~4-9fps without a hardware physx accelerator and 40-60 with one.
Ideally you want a 9600GT or higher, 9500GT just about does, anything lower isn't going to help much.
At the moment theres only a small handful of games that really use it much and none of them use it that ground breakingly... it does add a few nice touches to mirrors edge but nothing you can't live without.
Performance wise running it on the CPU with an ATI card as primary in a game that uses physx moderatly the difference is you'd be getting ~4-9fps without a hardware physx accelerator and 40-60 with one.
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PhysX works fine on ATI cards, but there wont be any official drivers/support for it... ever, because nvida will define the standards and can tweak it to maximise there benifit. Search google and you can find some info about it running on an ATI card. (i think it ran quicker on ATI then nvida too lol)
ATI cards will use Havok which is done using ATI Stream (ATI equivalent of CUDA). Intel's up and coming graphics cards will also be using Havok (as they bought the company out).
OpenCL on the other hand, is a 3rd parth API, which both ATI and nvida support. Hopefully game designers will take the hint and make everything with that to avoid the ati vs nvidia nonsense.
ATI cards will use Havok which is done using ATI Stream (ATI equivalent of CUDA). Intel's up and coming graphics cards will also be using Havok (as they bought the company out).
OpenCL on the other hand, is a 3rd parth API, which both ATI and nvida support. Hopefully game designers will take the hint and make everything with that to avoid the ati vs nvidia nonsense.
The source is open and unless nvidia then move to a "physx 2" and close ATI out they can't really tweak it to maximise performance for themselves at the expense of ATI. At which point we would be back where we are now which does no one any good.
EDITED coz I'm not sure if the ATI physx stuff is anything other than fake - the information I saw on it deffinatly didn't show the ATI hardware in a good light* against nVidia overall (tho peak performance was impressive) - but theres been so little progress and so much unecessary feet dragging, whining and posturing since that I don't believe they every really got it running in the first place.
I certainly hope some open cross platform physic solution is adopted, hopefully supporting both havok and physx as they are both very good at doing what they do but neither completely cover all scenarios.
* Lets be honest here - if the ATI hardware had excelled in doing physx ATI wouldn't have dragged their feet and then cut it off - it would have been a massive coup over nVidia beating them at their own game, positioned ATI cards as the physics processor of choice and then once havok (hardware accleration) was ready to roll out, the vast majority of gamers and developers would have swapped over without any fuss leaving nvidia biting dust.
And as I usually have to spell everything out to keep the trolls happy - Havok is widely accepted and well recieved by developers - given a choice between phsyx and havok 60-75% would go with havok - and most gamers vote with their wallets.
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Yeah pretty much
Not a lot in it really - whichever is cheapest/company you prefer.
GTX260 is probably the best budget buy atm - theres a gainward one at £135 - and they clock like monsters - easily reaches stock 285GTX performance - tho obviously the 285 can overclock as well.
TBH I'd say the options are either 260GTX and some overclocking or the 4890 - which is a very capable card.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-104-GW
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-195-AS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1403
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