What's this Separate Physics card all about

[alien.46.uk]

Hi All ...

Seen some mentions about of people having a decent card then using a lesser card to run the physics in game (I would presume this is nVidia based) ...

How does this work and any real advantages?

I've just not seen or heard this one before, except for the specific physics cards ive seen about that seemed to have died a death, but again never really investigated into them.

Would they run on an SLi board?, would it reuire 16x/16x or wud the main unit run @ 16x and the Phys run @ say 8x or 4x?

Just intregued ...

Some examples might be nice to if anyone knows of or runs that kind of spec.

 

[Dogoid]

just like the co-processor helped with a certain task and alleviated the load from the cpu years ago, this in a way is doing the same thing, taking a task away from the cpu and having a dedicated processor ( ppu ) to do it instead.


for people who run crossfire anyway , they can use that 2nd card for ppu instructions rather than by a separate physics card.

 

[alien.46.uk]

In that case could say a 9800GT or something run alongside a 280GTX for GFX, and aleaviate a Q6600 (purely some random examples) from processing the Physics?

Would the Physics card have to be close spec to the main Gfx chip or not?

Would the 9800GT for Phys. help the above set-up?

(That's if cards like that can be set to run Physics however, pretty sure I've seen some people who have, but cant find to much info on it).

 

[orderoftheflame]

Any good for you?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx_faq.html