so this is actually probably going to be a fairly interesting video here on my
test bench today I have two things I have a GTX 580 from
EVGA and I also have an
8600 GTS so that's a bit of a mismatch
you'd think what I will be looking at today is the performance impact of a
high performance graphics card versus a low performance graphics card as a
dedicated FX processor so this GTX 58 is
going to be doing all of my Graphics processing regardless and then I'm going
to run two different scenarios I'm going to run with the 8600 GTS as my dedicated
physx card and then I'm going to try running with another GTX 580 which is
obviously ludicrously Overkill as my
dedicated physx card so if you guys check out up here I have my physx
configuration set so I have selected the 8600 GTS as
my dedicated physx card and I'm going to try with both scenarios and I'll let you
guys know how it goes well I've already
run into some interesting results so I'm running at 1920 x 1080 on Mafia 2 I'm
running with high details 8X AF anti-aliasing is on and I've already run
only two scenarios so I've run the GTX
580 with the 8600 GTS as a dedicated FX
card and then I've run the GTX 580 ignoring the 8600 GTS so using itself
for physx you can force that in the driver as well and and it actually
scored or the GTX 580 actually scored
66% Higher by itself than it did by tying it down with
this 8600 GTS to do the physx processing so let's see what else we can
investigate here so at this point guys I've run
quite a few more fascinating scenarios so here you can see my GTX 580 running a
GTX 550 TI as a dedicated physics card
but I've actually finished all the Run throughs that I am going to do and I
just want to share with you my results so this is also going to be a a sneak
peek into what my next episode is going to be looking at PCIe bandwidth and the
effects on gaming performance but here I have my full results so the GTX 580
alone gets about 50 frames per second you throw in a FX card that's too slow
and it goes all the way down to 30 FPS
so what that means to me is that you're far better off to just let this card do
both the graphics and the FX by itself
then to give it something that's so slow that it bottlenecks it and that the
physx calculations are going to be behind the rate at which this card can
draw the frames okay so that is clearly a problem okay so then I tried a few
cards of varying power as a dedicated
physx card so I tried an additional GTX 580 I tried a GTX 560 TI as well as a
GTX 550 so I don't know where the threshold is but it looks like this is
how it works for physx because these three are all within margin of error of
each other uh regardless of how much physx power we're throwing at it I mean
a GTX 580 is clearly overkill for physx
processing but you can see that the 550 TI and the 560 TI are also both just
fine so the answer is I don't know exactly where that threshold is and it's
going to depend from game to game how much physx processing is needed but what
you need for physx is a card that is fast enough not too slow because that
will bottleneck your entire setup and not so fast that you're spending way too
much money on it so something like a 550 or even something a little bit lower end
or maybe a last generation card that you can get your hands on on the cheap is
probably the best bet if you have something like a GTX 580 as your main
card so thanks for checking out this little fizx episode of Linus Tech tips
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