So for a long time now I have been toying with the idea of buying a small cheap nVidia card to install along side the AMD card for the sole purpose of offloading the Physx work to it. Much like the original Ageia Physx card before they got shoehroned in to nVidia GPUs.
I have been thing about this since the release of Borderlands 2. It has Physx and for me being a pure AMD system all the Physx work was offloaded to the CPU. This lead to the GPU waiting for the CPU to be finished and bogging the frame rates down by about 30-40% in heavy areas.
I have others games that have Physx features and they are horrifically badly optimised when forced to the CPU. In general Physx sucks when offloaded to the CPU, mostly due to nVidia torpedoing their own code to keep people nVidia dependent.
Has anybody here done such a thing?
What is the lowest card you can get away with?
will it change frame rates in any significant way?
The way I understand it I could get a GT210 and because all it is doing is handling the Physx it will not impede the FPS. Eg. If I got 40 FPS in Borderlands 2 with the Physx off, when I installed the co-card and offloaded it to that I should still get 40 FPS but with full speed Physx.
Am I right in this assumption? Would a GT210 have the grunt if all it is doing is just Physx and Physx only.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, I am not locked to something as low as a GT210 but would not like to get to the point where it is not worth the return.
Link storm: http://physxinfo.com/wiki/Hybrid_PhysX
EDIT: This has been asked before, I did search. I was not happy with the answer. I would like to revisit this with the advancements that have been made.
EDIT: This has been asked before, I did search. I was not happy with the answer. I would like to revisit this with the advancements that have been made.
This really just rubs me the wrong way, especially considering I spend much of my very limited free time helping people out by sharing my knowledge. Answers aren't meant to make you happy, they're meant to give you knowledge; if you aren't happy with the answers, deal with it and create your own hacked driver.
I recall this driver a while ago when I was rocking the 5830, but came to the conclusion it wasn't worth it, especially considering I had to downgrade drivers, which will probably decrease performance anyway, especially in newer games, or introduce other bugs or artifacts. In short, it's really not worth the effort, PhysX isn't that great of a feature (as it's really only used for extra particle effects), and there aren't enough games that support the feature (and demand for that matter) for anyone to really try and force the feature on AMD cards anymore. Hell, even when I had a GTX 570 and a 650, I didn't even bother with PhysX because PhysX was never used in a meaningful way.
I tried to find you something more amenable to your desires. Although I agree with Jerm1027, I understand the difference between your liking an answer and the evidence behind the conclusion being unsatisfactory. I hope this helps.
I did not see you answer, Sorry if I offended. I was just wondering if it was worth it.
It has just been something I am interested in for a long time, not sure why. Even if it is not great, I just like having things to screw around with, something to keep me entertained. I just have a tinkering mind, nothing is ever finished for me.
As for the meaningful use of Physx, yes it is frivolous and does not add much but I like it. If it is an option I want to at least be able to look at it once is a while even if it is not permanent.
I can see that, My frame rates for me are perfectly playable with out Physx. But having an option on a menu that I can't use just annoys me for some reason. Like an itch that cannot be scratched.
And buying a more powerful CPU and a new AMD GPU would not solve the frame problem with Physx on, it would have to be an nVidia GPU and I just don't want one, I prefer AMD. In that sense there is little I could do and just have to accept it, but this seemed like it might be something to do, even for fun.
Also in the eventuality it does work I could use the nVidia co-card in any system I build after that date as all it does is the physx. I could go on building systems and always have the option available to me.
EDIT: I see what might be an issue with what I asked. By improve the frame rate I did not mean make it better. If the max the AMD card can do with out Physx is 40 I would not expect having a Physx card would increase it to 50, what I mean is instead of using Physx on AMD and it dragging the frame rate down to 25-30 it would stay at the 40 but also have the physx running and the frame rate would be stable. Sorry if that was misunderstood.
Thanks this does answer a few of the questions. I will still look into it further.
EDIT: This actually answers a lot of the uncertainty I and about it thanks. Reading down further it has exactly what I was looking for and frame rate number with varying nVidia cards and with out them at all. Cover pretty much all I wanted to know. This and pretty much be locked now.