I'm currently looking to build a gaming rig and have been researching graphics cards. From what I can tell AMD offers the best performance for your dollar while just gaming and Nvidia costs more but also excels for rendering. Also, only Nvidia cards have PhysX. My question is how much does Physix really add to the gameplay experience?
I'm looking at something like the EVGA 670 or for $30 more I can get a 7970.
I plan to do my gaming in 1080 so both cards should be able to handle anything I throw at them for quite a while.
No, it's a gimmick and looks fake as hell. Anything added is just so they can tag that they have PhysX I have never seen a game where is added anything.
Not very many games utilize physX, apparently it adds a bit to a few games (borderlands 2 being the main one recently i've heard about). I dont think its a gimmick, but its not utilized as well as it could be.
PhysX does add some coolness to the games, but not really worth it if an AMD card is the same performance but cheaper. I got a 650 Ti because it's price to performance was better at the time. PhysX is like an added bonus to me in some games, and I don't notice a difference in anything. Although Borderlands 2 has some big changes.
You can, however run PhysX off your CPU if it's good enough, making nVidia GPUs pointless.
PhysX is not a gimmick that is for sure. Anyone stating otherwise is an AMD zealot.
But I do not like how Nvidia has implemented it though.
For some games it is minute addition of detail that grants a finer experience for immersion (Dark Void)
And in other games it outright adds physics that the game should already have. (Borderlands 2 anyone?)
And in other games still it takes advantage of the latest discoveries with gfx and physics to update the game. (Arkham City)
Though it is merely in AAA titles for the most part. If you are someone who cares less about sightseeing and just want to game good for the money, get an AMD card.
I use both actively, but I lean more towards Nvidia mainly because of loyalty but also because I am spoiled on PhysX (even though you can run it off of your CPU, which btw I think is a terrible idea), I enjoy the CUDA cores for my working applications, and I can afford it...
Also AMD releasing tripple slot cards turned me away at one point but that is another story.
It is a no go to be a zealot for any one particular rival company when talking about hardware.
If you ask me, physX is a gimmick. There aren't many games that use it, and you honestly don't even notice it when you're in-game.
It's not worth the frame drop for no gameplay improvement. I also hate the way Nvidia makes it hard to run on the CPU. They haven't bothered making it optimised for multi-cores simply because they want people to buy their graphics hardware.
Other physics engines are just as good, havok, bullet, and ODE. PhysX is really just a set of physics libraries unnecessarily tied to Nvidia cards (that's why so few games use it), a bit silly really.
This, It always makes me cringe when I hear someone has a "dedicated physX card". Put it out of your mind unless the two cards are already neck and neck and you're looking for a tie breaker.