After my upgrade to an R9 290 it crossed my mind that I still have a GT 9600 laying around here. Does it make sense to pop it into my system and use it as a dedicated PhysX card for games like Borderlands 2? I've already looked the topic up and I've found everything from "it will help in some games" to "it probably won't work properly" and even "you will actually get worse performance".
So, does anyone have experience with that? I've never even thought about the possibility because I owned my last ATI GPU before physx even was a thing. Does it not work properly, is it not worth it to get a dedicated GPU for physx alone or is my GPU simply too old to keep up with my R9 290?
LTT did a test on this a few years ago. Basically, if the card is old/slow (like the GT 9600) the rendering GPU has to wait around for the PhysX info before it can render the frame. Using a slow card emphasises the delay and just makes things worse.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbww3dhzK0M
As Zanginator said, Your CPU will do a better job at physx. Dont bother. For the few games that support it, You need a semi decent card (750) to not gimp the performance of a higher card. And even then it dosent always improve performance. Just means less load of the main GPU.
Okay, thanks. I had a feeling that it wouldn't work out too well. Actually buying a low end GPU just for PhysX seems like a waste, I was just hoping that I could maybe put some old hardware to good use.