PhysX Cards - 10 years later do they still suck??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
980 words · ~4 min read
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so we haven't looked into physx since like 2011 and for some pretty good
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reasons actually but we'll get into that later looking back at the last physx
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video we released we noticed quite the demand in the comment section for a
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modern follow-up so we'll do that and try a bunch of different scenarios and
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add some more information to the
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pool Intel skull Canyon Nook features a six generation core i7 processor and
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Thunderbolt 3 you can learn more at the link in the video
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description so a few different questions will be raised and hopefully answered in
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this video we're going to look at the full range of current 1000 series NVIDIA
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Pascal gpus and how they perform while running alongside a physx focused
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lower-end GPU we're going to try to find what is the best bang for your buck in
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if you're shopping for a physx card and we're going to try to figure out roughly
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if it's worth it to add your old card to your new system as a physx GPU or if you
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should just sell it then last but not least we'll I'll just have some fun with
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some ludicrous setups like 1080 with a 1080 physx card and that's insane so why
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not in order to test all of these scenarios we needed some games our
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chosen games were Assassin's Creed Black Flag Metro last Light Fallout 4 and
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Batman Arkham Knight one of the most controversial releases of recent years
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so right away with Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Fallout 4 it just seems
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that having a physx card really doesn't do anything but Metro last Light does
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show relatively minor increases across the board and then boom holy benchmarks
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Batman out of nowhere like a thug in a dark alley maybe too soon it's been a
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while the Batman benchmarks did show significant improvements with a
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dedicated physx card and yeah let's dive
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deeper we'll start with the GTX 106 we first paired it with the
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gt730 now the gt730 is a really card if you're wondering why check out
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this video when paired with this shitty card it lost five frames per second on
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average rough when moving up to the 750 Ti however we saw an overall Improvement
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of about 2.5 FPS not a huge gain but
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it's something to work with stepping up a little bit to the 1070 we saw a
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similar story but to more extremes with the 1030 as a physx card we saw a loss
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of 11 FPS then with the 750 we saw a
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gain of 5 FPS so cool again when looking
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at the 1080 we saw extremes paired with the 730 it dropped almost 16 FPS with
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the 750 it gained just over 5 FPS and
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going up from there we seem to max out at a gain of about 6 to S even when the
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dedicated card was just another 1080
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which is crazy whoa okay so one of the
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cool things here is all of of the particle effects that are just
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everywhere the smoke the little Sparks there's a bunch of different stuff in
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this scene and that's why this game benefits so much from fizx but as you
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can see right now it's choppy it doesn't feel very good and that's because we're
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running with the GTX 730 if you check out in the bottom corner here you can
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see the utilization of both gpus the 730
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is doing a lot of work but the 1080 is barely working at all the 1080 is GPU 1
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the 730 is GPU 2 now with the 750 Ti you
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can see it's much more smooth the particle effects are all running fine
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it's not choppy anymore all that kind of good stuff and again we come down to the
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corner you can see that the utilization of the first card is not being hampered
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at all it's able to go full bore all the time which is why everything's much more
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smooth the physics card is able to operate on its own and do everything it
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needs to while not hampering the actual normal GPU and with that the sales of
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GTX 750 Ti and 760's go through the
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freaking roof NVIDIA mails us a check for $1 billion we buy 12 new office
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buildings each for one of Linus' Lambos
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and troll away into the night not so
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fast little Lambo lonus not so fast there are like an embarrassingly low
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amount of games that support physx and not that many come around the corner
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that will either a hard sell for someone that could just flip their old graphic
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card for more lunch money or avoid buying a physx card altogether so in the
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end the answer is it's just not worth it unless you really
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really like Batman games or for some other very intensely physx title and
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there really aren't many of them so good
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luck if you like this video like it and get subscribed if you dislike this video
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and you're like dude don't make a thugs in an alley joke about Batman that's
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just rude dislike it uh if you want a shirt or any of the things that you saw
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us use like graphics cards in this video you can check links in the video
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description below including to Amazon if you want to see another video that we've
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released check out this one on uh why
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SLI is crazy right now like what the hell is going on with SLI cuz it's it's
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nuts directx12 who knows