9800gt as a dedicated as PPU

[koryusai]

i have an old 9800gt i was wondering if i should install it as a physics processing unit? i have 1 gtx80 in there at the mo.

mobo asus rampage iv extreme

cpu 3930k

my ultimate question would it be worth it?

 

[yassarikhan786]

I've seen other people use a similar setup and more often than not, the older gen card as a physics processing unit does not actually help, it rather hinders performance slightly.

 

[Perturabo]

It depends what your main card is. The Physx card cant be a huge amount slower if you want it to give any benefit. For example with a gtx 480 the slowest card that improved performance noticeably was a gtx 280. What with the added heat and power consumption its almost certainly not worth it.

 

[JezEngland]

it should help on some titles, i put a 9800 with 2 480's an it helped mostly in Metro 2033. Though I've seen others benchmark results showing it lowered fps.

Here's m thread about it, on this forum: http://forum.overclock3d.net/index....hl__+9800gt++physx__fromsearch__1#entry375965

from that thread I got this, it shows an improvement:

1 GTX 480+9800 GT for APEX PhysX @ high setting: 43 - 9800GT max GPU usage: 74%

1 GTX 480 also doing APEX PhysX @ high setting: 37

1 GTX 480+1 GTX 480 for PhysX @ high setting: 47 - PhysX dedicated GTX 480 max GPU usage: 69%

This is from 2010 christmas, drivers are considerably different/better today! Maby it'll help and I'd reccommend a FERMI card over the 9800

 

[oneseraph]

I have been wondering about adding dedicated physX card for a while now. It dose seem to be a bit tricky to get the right balance. That is the maximum FPS gain with the least amount of expense. Because it will be a bit of a hassle to set up the last thing you want to do is harm performance. Therefore I suggest we ask OC3D to do a clinic on the subject. Who knows if enough of us ask maybe they will take an in depth look at the issue.

It would be good to see it set up with both an Nvidia card as the primary and an AMD card as the primary.

 

[thestepster]

older cards definately hinder performance on a GTX260 an 8800GTS hold that back quite a bit and then the GTX260 doing the business for my 580 also hinders its performance aswell, prob gonna be looking at a GTX460 for some kinda decent physx performance

 

[alienware]

I'm not sure that the actual PPU has changed tbh. Therefore, the faster the card the faster the PPU will operate.

I too did some experimenting and whilst Vantage was improved (with a 240 GT for the PPU) most games slowed down, most notably Mafia II because after all it's most notably one of about three games that actually have Physx and are worth playing.

You're better off (as always) with one fast GPU. Adding more adds heat, noise and power usage.

 

[JezEngland]

I think it's best to have a seperate card for PhysX because overall i found 1 GPU is less effecient doing more, I guess there's complications and bottlenecks involved. It'd've been good if I put a GTX480 doing everything result in my above posted linked thread.

 

[oneseraph]

Nvidia needs to just drop the proprietary physX and let it it run on any openCL device. I mean there is a reason that havok has so much more adoption in the market. If Nvidia is not careful physX is going to jump the shark, if it already hasn't.