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Anyone know about nvidias physx?With 2 video cards

cichy1012cichy1012 Member UncommonPosts: 345

Just bought a evga gtx 470 video card. Now im reading that I can set it up with one of my 8800 gt 512 cards. WOAH... Im confused now. Is this hard to do? Is it worth it? Anyone able to point me in the right direction?

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  • teddy_bareteddy_bare Member UncommonPosts: 398

    I don't know what nVidia calls it, but what you are talking about is generally reffered to as "Hybrid-Sli" or "Hybrid-Crossfire". I didn't know nVidia enabled this w/ their GPU's, but I know ATI does, in a very limited capacity. The way it works w/ ATI is you combine a discrete GPU, w/ the on-board video chipset, but ATI has it so that it only works w/ a limited number of chipsets, and only their lower-end GPU's and on-boards. For example, I believe the only way it works is if you have the 2400 on-board video, you can combine it w/ a discrete GPU for a supposed gain in performance. From what I understand though, if you have a halfway decent GPU, for example a 5830 or better, then you won't want to use the hybrid-crossfire.

    As for the physX you mentioned...nVidia has built physX support into their last couple generations of cards, so instead of forcing users to buy a physX card in a ddition to a GPU, they built it right into their cards. It sounds better on paper then it works in practice though, b/c as far I know very few games support physX, and having that technology on their cards only helps jack up the price which, IMHO, is one of the reasons they have been getting trounced in sales lately. If it was more widely implemented it would be awesome and hard to argue against having a nVidia GPU, but as it is it's really nothing more then another bullet-point on the box.

  • noquarternoquarter Member Posts: 1,170


    Originally posted by cichy1012
    Just bought a evga gtx 470 video card. Now im reading that I can set it up with one of my 8800 gt 512 cards. WOAH... Im confused now. Is this hard to do? Is it worth it? Anyone able to point me in the right direction?

    Yes you can use a CUDA-enabled Geforce card (pretty much anything after 8600GT) as a dedicated PhysX card in conjunction with your primary video card. This puts the PhysX load entirely on the dedicated card and will regain the FPS you lose when you turn on GPU PhysX in games that support GPU PhysX (Batman: AA, Mirror's Edge, couple others..).


    This isn't anything to do with SLI it's just offloading PhysX processing, and is easy to set up. If you have a second PCI-e slot on your mobo just put it in there, the mobo doesn't even need SLI support because you won't be using it in SLI. Then go into nVidia control panel and set the card to dedicated PhysX. When you are not playing games you will still be able to use the dedicated PhysX card as a video card meaning you could hook up 2 more monitors to it also.


    The only question to me is whether it's worth the extra heat and power consumption when you aren't playing one of the few games that use GPU PhysX. If you aren't playing one of the games on this list: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_physxgames_home.html then it's probably not worth keeping plugged in.

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