I have been using Nvida Gpu's for years but i have recently found a 7970 GHz edition for $360. From the benchmarks I have seen, this card has similar performance to the 780 which costs considerably more. I was originally considering a 770, but now I am unsure. I have grown attached to physx in several games including Flight Sim x, Arma 3, and Rise of the Triad (not to mention that I am unsure the AMD would run this game well seeing what is on the steam fourms). I am pretty sure both will offer the performance I want, I am just unsure if I would be dissapointed in AMD's lack of this specific feature.
I am also justifying this purchace by having it run other software like Solid Works, Autodesk Inventor. Is there and AMD vs Nvidia preferance, or should i just opt for a more professional Firepro or Quadro card latter down the line?
I wouldnt say the 7970 Ghz is as powerful as the 780 but its definatly worth buying if your on a budget and dont need top end power. However Physx is becoming more common now days and I would personaly go for the 780. But if you want to fiddle with drivers then you can get physx running on your old gpu while running a 7970. Not easy but its an option. Plus you will have to redo it every update.
@ the $400 mark PhysX means NOTHING to gaming. Both cards can push most games @ 1080p beyond 50FPS
If you can use OpenCL USE IT. It's leagues faster than CUDA and PhysX because it's not proprietary.
Unless you see a firesale I don't think you're going to find a 780 close to $400. So i'd say it boils down to the 770 and the 7970. but are what i would call equivilant in gaming, one beating the other depending on the game. The 7970 is cheaper right now because they're paving the way for the next gen. the 770 is a newer card and has PhysX & CUDA accelerations.
How much are you going to be using CUDA and PhysX? Does it justify the slightly higher cost to you?
AMD destrosy Nvidia in almost every single GPU compute benchmark and real-world application, not to mention that the equivalent cards are cheaper for gaming performance.. Double point precision also lacks on the Nvidia series of consumer cards. AMD all the way, unless you are buying cards for Folding. Professional cards and gaming cards, it needs ot be AMD.
I'd get a 7970, or hold out a little bit for the 9970, which looks to be quite a nice card. With the way the 7970 has been handling those Core 17 WUs, I'll probably pick up 9970 CF for my Folding rig when they drop. For once, I'll be able to get the real reference cards to put under water :)
7970, or 9970, if you can wait. Forget about Nvidia.
There's a difference between a game using PhysX and a game using GPU-accelerated PhysX. Arma 3, for example, has PhysX, but it never touches the GPU (even with Nvidia) because it's only doing vehicle suspensions and ragdolls, which are damn near trivial work for the CPU anyway. That's how most PhysX games are, Borderlands 2 being a notable exception, but my CPU (2600k at 4.5ghz) can even handlethat on the highest PhysX setting.
Every game I've seen with GPU PhysX support just uses it to throw particles all over the screen and make a big mess. It never adds to the game anyway.
It depends I don't believe cs5 or Solidworks would take advantage of CUDA at all. My main consern with the physx and it's use on soft body physics and fabric simulation in gaming. Is this sort of thing a physx excusive? If it is not, i would happily switch over to the red team.
PhysX doesn't do anything that can't be done with an OpenCL-based physics engine, no. At the moment, very few, if any, games actually use OpenCL for physics. I see two reasons for that:
1. Current generation consoles can't do GPU physics at all, therefore it's not put into many games. That's also why when PhysX is used, it's never for anything that actually adds to the game. Next-gen consoles will both have AMD APUs and will be more than capable of OpenCL physics, and it will probably be taken advantage of, maybe not right away, but eventually.
2. The only reason ANY games have PhysX support is because Nvidia pushes for it. The games with PhysX support, especially GPU PhysX (which, again, is not ALL PhysX titles), tend to be the games that Nvidia had a hand in developing. Those Batman games come to mind. They're also usually the games that heavily push 3D and other gimmicks.
If GPU-accelerated physics starts to kick off with the next-gen consoles, the Bullet physics library will probably be much more widely used than PhysX, because it's free, open source, and not tied to one company's GPUs.
Also, OpenCL physics would definitely run better on AMD cards.
I am all for the 7970, I am just conserned about the drivers. I am unsure if it would be able to play Rise of the Triad based on it's gpu utilization: http://steamcommunity.com/app/217140/discussions/0/846960481985567466/ This game does however run maxed easily with my old 550 Ti. Can i run both amd and nvidia drivers as a quick fix before interceptor gets to fixing this game?
If you use photoshop steer clear of AMD. There's something wrong with the CCC/drivers and photoshop: it will disable your escape key if both are running. However, even when the ccc.exe is killed and you run a game with ps open, it will still kill your escape key.
As far as I know, nvidia doesn't have that problem but I would love to hear if anyone has experienced that.