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AMD primary, nVidia for PhysX... ?

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a c i d.f l y

a c i d.f l y

Member
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Joined
Apr 1, 2003
Location
Austin, TX, USA
TL;DR - PhysX can be dedicated to an nVidia card with one or more AMD cards as the primary display and GPU processing by using the mod provided on this link:
http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/17706-hybrid-physx-mod-v1-03-v1-05ff.html

I have another post discussing the possibility of adding a 3rd AMD card, but now I am pondering the addition of an nVidia card. Almost every game I play has incorporated PhysX (Crysis 2, Metro 2033, and The Old Republic which I will be playing tomorrow). Anyone have personal experience using AMD cards primarily while running an nVidia card for dedicated PhysX calculations? Which cards do you have? How is the performance hit? How do you like it otherwise? From what I'm reading, I will need at least a GTX260. I can get a GTX260 new for about $99, or a GTX460 off eBay for about the same.

Edit: Ended up picking up the GT 545 and it worked out perfectly. All games utilizing PhysX experience zero lag or slowdown. Effects appear incredibly natural.
 
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Good question, interested to see input. I would think there'd be driver conflicts, but I don't really know. Subscribed.
 
I.M.O.G. said:
Good question, interested to see input. I would think there'd be driver conflicts, but I don't really know. Subscribed.
Click to expand...

From what I've read thusfar, it requires a specific version of the nVidia driver in order to function properly. nVidia has coding in most versions that will de-activate PhysX when it detects an AMD card. It is still possible, just challenging. I'm more curious if there's a drop or increase in performance when running "High" PhysX on a game like Crysis 2 -- that game already screams across three monitors, but any visual enhancements would be neat. It was sad looking at the "starched" American flags "bending" in the wind instead of flowing.

 
I had a thread on this a while back and it is possible with a driver hack but in the end it was not worth it for me. I just bought all nVidia for that system.
 
Archer0915 said:
I had a thread on this a while back and it is possible with a driver hack but in the end it was not worth it for me. I just bought all nVidia for that system.
Click to expand...

I would say money is no object, but I'm not about to spend $1000 on equivalent nVidia cards when I already have over $700 in ATI cards -- I just wanted to add a GTX260 to "spice things up". :shrug:

I take it you weren't able to get things running?
 
The following link should prove quite useful!

http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/17706-hybrid-physx-mod-v1-03-v1-05ff.html

I'm still shopping for an appropriate PhysX card. I'm having an incredibly hard time discovering which aspect of the nVidia cards will impact PhysX performance -- given PhysX requires 32 CUDA cores, does performance increase with more than 32? Is performance limited by GPU clock speed? The GT545 is tweaking my interest for this application. Maybe this should go in the nVidia section? ...

GT 520 ($50) - 48 cores, 810 MHz core, 1620 MHz shader, 1333-1700 MHz memory.
GT 545 ($120) -144 cores, 720 MHz core, 1440 MHz shader, 1800 MHz memory, 70W, single slot.
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1077882&mpage=1

GT 550ti ($140) - 192 cores, 900 MHz core, 1800 MHz shader, 4100 MHz memory.
GTS 450 ($120) - 192 cores, 783 MHz core, 1566 MHz shader, 3608 MHz memory
GTX 460 - 288 cores, 658 MHz core, 1296 MHz shader, 3400 MHz memory.
 
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I'd go for the 520 or the 550ti out of that list, personally.
Probably the 520 as you don't know for sure whether you can even get physx to work with ATI primary cards.
 
Figured it out. I had to disable DX10 in BM: AA. Thus, PhysX works splendidly. Smoke, cloth and particle leaf effects that seemed blatantly absent before are now rendered without hesitation. I experience no slow down whatsoever. I'll post updates as I continue to tweak things.

I'm running AMD 11.9, CAP4, nVidia 285.62 WHQL, PhysX 9.11.0621*.

**Installing patch 1.1 fixes any PhysX related bugs with B:AA.

PhysX on High. Vsync On.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Benchmark Results:
Minimum: 40
Maximum: 60
Average: 56

:clap:


*Edit 2: I'd like to mention the game will run with PhysX turned on before I installed the GT 545, however, it was entirely unplayable and I had PhysX on Medium. :thup:

I suppose it was worth the $100. :shrug:

*Edit 3: Crysis 2, man, wow. As if this game wasn't already immersive enough... Metro 2033, not a fan of this game to begin with and the effects aren't nearly as pronounced. Works wonderfully though. I'm anxious for Batman Arkham City and The Old Republic.
 
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Nice. Was actually wondering this myself. Was just debating if I should get a cheap Nvidia card now or wait until the HD7xxx/GTX6xx hits and see if I like anything enough to upgrade.
 
I didn't think there was a lot of games that use PhysX only one I know was GRAW 2 off top of my head.
 
The annoying part to me is that my CPU could totally render that stuff, but it's locked away to advertise physx.
 
You can turn on PhysX manually in Batman and let the CPU/GPU render it -- problem is, it isn't coded properly and interferes with the natural flow of the CPU/GPU processing. My CPU is already pinged out running a pair of HD6970's. I tried this and it dragged Batman to a crawl just to render some mild fog.

There really aren't that many games that utilize it, but there are a few that I just happen to play that do (Batman, The Old Republic, Crysis 2).

Here are my Batman:AA Benchmark results using *just* the GT545, max settings, 1080p and HIGH PhysX.
Minimum: 14
Maximum: 60
Average: 36

My triple card Benchmark above was done at 2048x1152 and gained 20 avg FPS (+36FPS min) while using 16xEQ AA with Super-Sample (via RadeonPro). The GT545 was only running at 4X AA (via ingame toggle). Which is still decent, but can't compare visually. I'd expect the FPS delta to scale exponentially if I were to increase resolution (three monitors, etc). You know, not that I expected the GT545 to be all that amazing, but I am astonished at how well it can run BM:AA at full in-game settings.
 
Maximum GPU utilization in Batman: Arkham Asylum Benchmark:
GPU 1 (HD6970): 51%
GPU 2 (HD6970): 100%
GPU 3 (GT545): 43% (PhysX on High)

Interesting results. I'm running 11.10 without CAP4.

Thought it was also worth noting that I'm in a x16/x8/x8 formation for my video cards now, instead of x16/x8/x4 -- pushing the nvidia card up in bandwidth. This pushed up my minimum and average framerates by a little.
Minimum: 46
Maximum: 61 (vsync)
Average: 59 -- I'm curious what this would look like without Vsync.
 
img43381.jpg


img43531.jpg


:drool::thup:
 
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