Thread: Dammit

Welp... i was considering getting another 5850 to crossfire them up. Unfortunately there are no hacked bios drivers that I can find to make it work on my motherboard. When I purchased this mobo a couple of years ago the AMD chipset board was having issues so I opted for the 980a. I bought an AMD card because the nvidia cards at the time were over priced, under powered, and way too hot.

From what I can see my only option is to purchase a new mobo/ram and vid to pull it off. Maybe a crowbar and a small sledge to swap out chipsets?
Bleh.

I am gonna try using my 9800gtx as a physx card later today though. Got some running around to do.

confirmed working

5850 main
9800gtx physX

has run most of my games so far... gonna try bc2

hey there, so wise with the GPUs, would it be more worth my effort to do this...

stop using two 5870s in crossfirex, and instead use one of them for physX? or is not possible/not worth my effort?

Thanks in advance, GPU guru.

physX is an nvidia thing and it's just eye candy really. 5870's stack pretty well from the reviews I've read recently so i reckon crossfirex is the way to go. If you have an extra slot buy a cheap 8xxx series 250 and set it for physx. It's a bit of mucking around to get it turned on but well worth it imo.

Physx does look nice.

I know stun said MW2 looked bad... it looks amazing wiht physX turned on. Office room fights look amazing... paper and office supplies flying around.

If you have nvidia cards 8800gts and later, you don't need a dedicated physx card. They have separate physx processors on board the video cards that is a completely separate core from the gpu. So with my 3-way SLI I actually have 3 physx processors (8800GTX's) along with 3 gpu's, and shit looks pretty in games :-) 16xQ AA supersampling 16x AF. 1920x1080 res all details on high, 3-way sli and physx both enabled. Lag free in bfbc2.

Basically if you have a card with a physx proc built in, you don't need a dedicated physx card waste of money unless you have an old 7900gt or something you want to put to use, you can dedicate that to physx to reduce load on an onboard physx proc. If running sli, no need as you already have more than 1 physx proc sharing load. A dedicated won't improve performance, it will just make your physx procs you already have do absolutely nothing, as they don't take load off the gpu at all, nor do they put load on it.

Thanks for learning me!

Originally Posted by jigabooplz

If you have nvidia cards 8800gts and later, you don't need a dedicated physx card. They have separate physx processors on board the video cards that is a completely separate core from the gpu. So with my 3-way SLI I actually have 3 physx processors (8800GTX's) along with 3 gpu's, and shit looks pretty in games :-) 16xQ AA supersampling 16x AF. 1920x1080 res all details on high, 3-way sli and physx both enabled. Lag free in bfbc2.

Basically if you have a card with a physx proc built in, you don't need a dedicated physx card waste of money unless you have an old 7900gt or something you want to put to use, you can dedicate that to physx to reduce load on an onboard physx proc. If running sli, no need as you already have more than 1 physx proc sharing load. A dedicated won't improve performance, it will just make your physx procs you already have do absolutely nothing, as they don't take load off the gpu at all, nor do they put load on it.

** please make sure the bus is the same on the cards you want to pair.. you may not see any improvements, as jigga stated, but you will definately see a hindrance if you put a real low end nvidia card..

Like if hades had put in a 9500gt with his 5850, he would be limited to the bus of the 9500gt I believe...

amirite?

I'm pretty sure they run on seperate bus. You mean the 16x 8x and 4x ?? If that's what you mean that is completely up to the motherboard. Mine does 2 pci-e 16x and 3 cards at 8x.

It works fine... there are a few software bugs. You need to disable ati card to acccess nvidia control panel to enable the physX. Then you need to re-enable the 5850 and disable the 9800gtx to make the ATI the main card. Then re-enable the 9800. It's a bunch of fuckin around but like I say it works.

This was impossible a couple years ago. I would much rather have dual 5850's than mixing vid cards. The 5850's I have in crossfire and overclocked DESTROY nvidia's top card. "they" will do 300gb/s and do JUST less than double the performance in every single review I have seen. The reviewers are all a little surprised by the increase.

I'm almost positive jiga is wrong on this, I'll see if I can't find some benches of single/dual/triple cards with and w/o physx...


*EDIT*

Here's one example. They may have fixed it since the 280's or this article, but having physx enabled on a separate card does improve performance.

Is a Nvidia 560 Ti a good videocard?

Originally Posted by eRazorzEDGE

I'm almost positive jiga is wrong on this, I'll see if I can't find some benches of single/dual/triple cards with and w/o physx...


*EDIT*

Here's one example. They may have fixed it since the 280's or this article, but having physx enabled on a separate card does improve performance.

you might see a performance on the memory aspect of the cards...physx and gpu have to share the cards memory, but they are both completely separate processors on the nvidia cards...literally separated by several inches on my 8800's. memory is an aspect you can see a performance gain on, but in my case that's a moot point as i have 2304MB of video memory alone. (768MB per card x3)

so yes adding memory to the pool does help :) as for bus limitations, another card is not going to slow down the bus. now if running an overclocked card with a non overclocked card in SLI, the faster card will run at the slower cards clock speeds to sync with each other. Same goes for memory (like dual or tri-channel memory) slowest always sets the bar for the rest.

nvidia worked around that a bit with the dedicated physx, as that card does not have to sync with the others, does not have to share power with the others, and only does physx rendering, it does not get hit with AA and AF loads, or any of that shit. speaking of...wonder how good bf2 would look in 32x AA :) my cards cant handle bc2 in 32x without chop, but bf2 a single card could handle, so 3 cards should decimate it! :)

You will notice a performance increase if you sli 2 cards and use one for physX only jigga. Try it out please because I want to know. You need 2 monitors to do it as well. One monitor for the sli and one for the physX.

Thanks.

nothing wrong with that card Major

Why would I use two monitors for that? I have only 1 40" monitor...