Physics - how often is this used?

[chickadee]

Since I have always had Nvidia cards physics has always defaulted to being on my GPU.

I was reading that AMD cards dont have that ability and use the CPU instead.

Just wondering is this a common thing that games use and if so is it a big performance hit because the card cant process it?

 

[Rroff]

About 80% of games use some variation of CPU based physics - usually implemented via a small number of 3rd party libraries (not tied to AMD or nVidia), a few games can use GPU accelerated physics mostly via nVidia's PhysX library.

The performance aspect side of it is beyond a simple post really but the simple answer is thar you aren't losing performance by having the option selected.