Dedicated PhysX Card Experiment - How Powerful Does it Have to Be? Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
745 words · ~3 min read
0:00
so this is actually probably going to be a fairly interesting video here on my
0:04
test bench today I have two things I have a GTX 580 from
0:08
EVGA and I also have an
0:12
8600 GTS so that's a bit of a mismatch
0:15
you'd think what I will be looking at today is the performance impact of a
0:20
high performance graphics card versus a low performance graphics card as a
0:26
dedicated FX processor so this GTX 58 is
0:30
going to be doing all of my Graphics processing regardless and then I'm going
0:33
to run two different scenarios I'm going to run with the 8600 GTS as my dedicated
0:38
physx card and then I'm going to try running with another GTX 580 which is
0:43
obviously ludicrously Overkill as my
0:47
dedicated physx card so if you guys check out up here I have my physx
0:51
configuration set so I have selected the 8600 GTS as
0:57
my dedicated physx card and I'm going to try with both scenarios and I'll let you
1:00
guys know how it goes well I've already
1:04
run into some interesting results so I'm running at 1920 x 1080 on Mafia 2 I'm
1:08
running with high details 8X AF anti-aliasing is on and I've already run
1:15
only two scenarios so I've run the GTX
1:18
580 with the 8600 GTS as a dedicated FX
1:21
card and then I've run the GTX 580 ignoring the 8600 GTS so using itself
1:27
for physx you can force that in the driver as well and and it actually
1:31
scored or the GTX 580 actually scored
1:35
66% Higher by itself than it did by tying it down with
1:41
this 8600 GTS to do the physx processing so let's see what else we can
1:46
investigate here so at this point guys I've run
1:50
quite a few more fascinating scenarios so here you can see my GTX 580 running a
1:55
GTX 550 TI as a dedicated physics card
1:58
but I've actually finished all the Run throughs that I am going to do and I
2:02
just want to share with you my results so this is also going to be a a sneak
2:06
peek into what my next episode is going to be looking at PCIe bandwidth and the
2:10
effects on gaming performance but here I have my full results so the GTX 580
2:15
alone gets about 50 frames per second you throw in a FX card that's too slow
2:21
and it goes all the way down to 30 FPS
2:25
so what that means to me is that you're far better off to just let this card do
2:29
both the graphics and the FX by itself
2:33
then to give it something that's so slow that it bottlenecks it and that the
2:37
physx calculations are going to be behind the rate at which this card can
2:40
draw the frames okay so that is clearly a problem okay so then I tried a few
2:46
cards of varying power as a dedicated
2:49
physx card so I tried an additional GTX 580 I tried a GTX 560 TI as well as a
2:56
GTX 550 so I don't know where the threshold is but it looks like this is
3:01
how it works for physx because these three are all within margin of error of
3:05
each other uh regardless of how much physx power we're throwing at it I mean
3:09
a GTX 580 is clearly overkill for physx
3:12
processing but you can see that the 550 TI and the 560 TI are also both just
3:18
fine so the answer is I don't know exactly where that threshold is and it's
3:22
going to depend from game to game how much physx processing is needed but what
3:27
you need for physx is a card that is fast enough not too slow because that
3:32
will bottleneck your entire setup and not so fast that you're spending way too
3:37
much money on it so something like a 550 or even something a little bit lower end
3:41
or maybe a last generation card that you can get your hands on on the cheap is
3:45
probably the best bet if you have something like a GTX 580 as your main
3:49
card so thanks for checking out this little fizx episode of Linus Tech tips
3:53
don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews computer videos and
3:56
other good stuff like that