Dedicated PhysX - Still Relevant?

Is dedicated PhysX still a thing worth doing?

I'm planning to upgrade my SLI 670's to SLI 980 Ti's (If they're a thing otherwise the equivalent) and I'm trying to think of uses for my 670's other than selling them as I doubt I'll get much from them. I've been thinking I'll use at least one to support a Media center/Steam box-esque system for my TV but it will only be used for low demand platformer type games so SLI seems a little overkill.

So I'm left with one spare and I was wondering whether it would be worth putting a ASUS DirectCU II GTX 670 as a dedicated PhysX card in my future build, what do you guys think any experience with dedicated PhysX & modern cards?

I'd appreciate any input.

From my understanding, using Physx in an SLI setup makes for some really apparent stuttering.

In which case I think it would be useful to keep one.

depends. A slower card handing physx can help but can also hamper performance. Depends on how slow as if the slower card cant handle the physx that the higher cards expect, esp in an sli situation you would be better off dropping the card and just accepting more load on the more powerful cards. Otherwise it can cause stuttering. To be honest, Physx is so uncommon I wouldnt even worry about it. With Dual 980's, you wouldnt have any issues pushing games with physx in the first place.

As in keep one out of the new build as stuttering is bad? Sorry a little confused.

That is interesting though I will have to look into that sounds like it's useless to have a dedicated PhysX card if that is the case. Thanks.

That is actually something I was hoping to find some input on from this thread, would a 670 support 980's or hold them back when used for dedicated PhysX or if it did help would it be beneficial enough to justify the extra heat and power consumption or would it be so negligible that it isn't worth doing.

I know PhysX is uncommon and that the 980's should (I would hope! haha) be more than powerful enough for any games of the time but I'm just trying to figure out what to do with the spare 670, if it improved FPS at any decent amount it would be better than it sitting around gathering dust.

Thanks.

Yes, keep one. The stuttering can be very bad, as the problem occurs when Physx can only use one of the cards, not both. That gives one of the cards extra load, and then that introduces lower FPS (Perhaps not significantly) but then also higher frame latency.

On example: http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=216602

Edit: Hmm perhaps 980s would avoid the issue, I forgot about that.

I suppose it never hurts to try.

the only games that will even bother using physx are ones nvidia pays a boat load of money to.

That is just my (rather jaded) opinion...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_hardware-accelerated_PhysX_support

list of all games that can actually utilize hardware physX - fucking small list dude - it's not worth it

I have a GTX 770 as my primary card and I use my GTX 570 as a PhysX card and it actually works pretty well... However, I tried using a 550Ti as a PhysX card and it actually got me worse performance.  You pretty much have to have something that is at least 70% as powerful as your main card, or else you are just damaging performance.

It does appear to be that way haha. But I've got this card sitting around either way. If it helps performance in any way then I think it's better to have it in doing something than sitting around as a paperweight.

But again- I have this card spare already. So if I have it sitting around anyway I think it is going to be worth it *if* it doesn't hinder performance and actually helps.

I play a lot of Borderlands and I'd love to get that running at a smooth 120FPS at 1440P if a dedicated PhysX card would give me the edge to have that stable I would be pretty happy with it. Also I find if I turn PhysX off in Metro games they become a lot easier to run so maybe a dedicated PhysX card would help out with them too which would be pretty cool haha.

Interesting. I wonder how that works out with SLI as in whether it needs to be that powerful relative to one of the cards or both in SLI. But perhaps that comes back to the stuttering issue Morgoth780 has mentioned.

I would think a GTX 670 is a pretty powerful dedicated PhysX card.

It's looking more and more like people just don't really bother with dedicated PhysX anymore especially with SLI so I'm guessing this is something I'm just going to have to test out myself when the cards I want come out haha.

Join the GPU coaster revolution!

Alright, you're saying to put one in the system as a dedicated PhysX card to try and counter this issue. Haha was a little hard to wrap my head around whether you thought I should use it or save it for something else until I read that thread.

I fortunately haven't noticed any issues with my 670's in SLI and PhysX so that is lucky but I see your point if the 670 doesn't hold the 980's back it would come in very useful as a dedicated PhysX card even if all it did was help to avoid these kinds of driver bugs.

Cheers.

Oh boy, I couldn't. Maybe I can do that with my GTX 480.. but even still.. Haha. Actually I might do that it's been sitting around doing nothing for years and I don't want to do anything with it because it pumps out too much heat and pulls too much power.

it's just that PhysX is not that big of a deal.It used to be back in day ..but only for a short while.If PhysX would've been an universal tool on any graphics card(i'm talking about hardware accelerated physX) maybe PhysX would've been more relevant( i still doubt that).

If you want to test it out,and see if it's worth keeping that extra gtx 670 by all means,knock yourself out :D.

 

 

It could also be the fact that we are getting tired of games just looking pretty and not function properly or just require you to be on your seat and just watch how the game plays out for itself..we are leaning towards gameplay rather than graphics(at least i hope we are doing that).Thus people won't spend tons of money just to get that extra little particles that physx offer you.