Dedicated PhysX card.............................is it worth it?

Hi guys and girls i need a little help.  I have a 560Ti and i want to prolong it a little longer to let my job settle to save money to get my new rig.  Now i have a 450 laying around, would it be worth it having this card as a dedicated Physx card?  Now my concerns are:

1)  Space and heat - the 2 pci-e slots in my board are pretty close together meaning there is only a few mm between my main gpu - will this cause a lot of heat between the 2 cards?  My case is well vented with good circulation

2)  Does this affect the bandwidth of my PCi-e slots?  On the motherboard spec sheet its says 1 x 16 or 2 x 8, the fact that it isnt in sli does this mean this is not the case and the main GPU will be running at full speed?

3)  Is it worth it for the 3 games i have and maybe handful i grab this year?

PC Spec:

i5 750

8gb

560Ti OC

Asus Maximus iii Gene

Antec 100

650W Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold

Not worth it imo. You could grab a 9600GT for like 20$ and have it as your physx cardMonsieurX

What would be the benefit of buying a 9600 over the 450?  Surely the more ram and stuff would help?

I have a GTX 680 with a GTX 260 as the dedicated PhysX card, can't really tell the difference. I'm thinking of throwing a GTX 460 in as the dedicated because I have one lying around. I guess at some point I'll get around to benchmarking all 3 options; 680 solo, 680+GTX260 and 680+GTX460...

[QUOTE="MonsieurX"]Not worth it imo. You could grab a 9600GT for like 20$ and have it as your physx card5SI-GonePostal

What would be the benefit of buying a 9600 over the 450?  Surely the more ram and stuff would help?

no physx is a gimmick. If you must buy get a super cheap card.

I have a GTX 680 with a GTX 260 as the dedicated PhysX card, can't really tell the difference. I'm thinking of throwing a GTX 460 in as the dedicated because I have one lying around. I guess at some point I'll get around to benchmarking all 3 options; 680 solo, 680+GTX260 and 680+GTX460...

heretrix

It depends on the physX card you will be using. You won't see much of an off-load with a GTX 460 but you will probably see better performance with a 560ti. That's just an example. With a very good dedicated PhysX graphics card, you could see performances gains up to 18%.

I will do a GTX 670 Sig2 + GTX 580 physx test tonight and I will report back. Mind you, the GTX 580 is my old card so I wouldn't recommend going out to buy an expensive GPU just to do physX. You might as well SLi.

Again, you won't see the optimal gains unless the game is heavy on physX - i.e. Borderlands 2, Arkham City.

Remember that some older GPUs can actually hurt your performance, I remember reading somewhere like for example if you had a 580 and a 9600GT for PhysX it would actually perform worse that the 580 just doing the PhysX on its own. If your going to have a dedicated PhysX card I wouldn't recommend anything lower than a 460.V4LENT1NE

I have a 480 dedicated to Physx and it's practically worthless.  

Batman AC is the only game where it's kinda cool, but that's about it.  

I wouldnt bother wasting my time if you dont have a spare card sitting in your closet.  

Nah, not worth it.

You won't even see the difference anyway.

Just as a heads up, make sure that if you do decide to run a dedicated physx card that the vram speed is equal to or faster than the speed that your man card(s) run at. I had debated about putting a dedicated card in for physx because I had a spare GTS 450 lying around I figured I could use for physx until I had the time to build a mame cabinet or something fun like that. Anyway I was running a GTX 690 at the time so it did very well by itself but I looked online to see how much of a boost I could expect by running the GTS 450 as physx but what I found online surprised me and it was showing people getting worse FPS with certain dedicated physx cards if they were older or slower cards. So after a bit of research and trial on my own system with both the GTX 690 and on another machine running a GTX 580 as it's main card I found all the tests to be accurate and my frame rate lowered considerably. What I found out and it makes perfect sense after I saw an online post pointing out that most peoples main cards are using DDR5 VRAM and the older or lower end cards usually have DDR3 VRAM. The speed difference between the DDR5 VRAM and the DDR3 VRAM caused the whole system to slow down. The higher powered card had to sit and wait while the slower card played catch up. The computing performance you saved by offloading the work to a secondary card was greatly offset by the decrease in speed of the other card. So basically if you have a DDR5 VRAM in your main card if you decide to run a dedicated physx then make sure it is at least running DDR5 VRAM. If your main card is running DDR3 VRAM than either DDR3 or DDR5 would work without slowing the system down but in all honesty if you are running a card with DDR3 VRAM as your main card then sell it as well as the extra card you were going to use for physx and buy a newer/better card, you will get much more out of that.fed250

Nope, not worth it at all. 

Last time I did research on it, you'd have to buy like a $100 PhysX card to see any improvement.

and because only part of the board would actually be used for PhysX, you'd waste a lot.

Just...enable PhysX in your games and disable AA. That's what I do. 

You can also buy old PhysX dedicated boards on ebay for like $15. You can at least run PhysX in old games like Mirror's Edge that way.

just oc you cpu, it might be able to handle it.

A 550 Ti is capable of maxing any PhysX setting. Anything more is overkill, but doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. Definitely use it if you can.

Not worth it in my opinion.  I once bought a GTX 650ti for dedicated Physx to team up with my GTX 680, and I got lower performance in Batman Arkham City the letting my GTX 680 do the rendering and the Physx.  Also I one time had 2 GTX 580's in my system and I dedicated one for Physx and got only a little bit better performance in Batman Arkham City.  So I guess if you are going to use a much slower card to dediate to Physx than your primary card then it can actually lower performance in Physx enabled games.

[QUOTE="fed250"]Just as a heads up, make sure that if you do decide to run a dedicated physx card that the vram speed is equal to or faster than the speed that your man card(s) run at. I had debated about putting a dedicated card in for physx because I had a spare GTS 450 lying around I figured I could use for physx until I had the time to build a mame cabinet or something fun like that. Anyway I was running a GTX 690 at the time so it did very well by itself but I looked online to see how much of a boost I could expect by running the GTS 450 as physx but what I found online surprised me and it was showing people getting worse FPS with certain dedicated physx cards if they were older or slower cards. So after a bit of research and trial on my own system with both the GTX 690 and on another machine running a GTX 580 as it's main card I found all the tests to be accurate and my frame rate lowered considerably. What I found out and it makes perfect sense after I saw an online post pointing out that most peoples main cards are using DDR5 VRAM and the older or lower end cards usually have DDR3 VRAM. The speed difference between the DDR5 VRAM and the DDR3 VRAM caused the whole system to slow down. The higher powered card had to sit and wait while the slower card played catch up. The computing performance you saved by offloading the work to a secondary card was greatly offset by the decrease in speed of the other card. So basically if you have a DDR5 VRAM in your main card if you decide to run a dedicated physx then make sure it is at least running DDR5 VRAM. If your main card is running DDR3 VRAM than either DDR3 or DDR5 would work without slowing the system down but in all honesty if you are running a card with DDR3 VRAM as your main card then sell it as well as the extra card you were going to use for physx and buy a newer/better card, you will get much more out of that.hofuldig

You know I thought exactly the same thing.

'Return' key is your friend ;)

Nope, it isn't. You would be better off getting a decent single card and it will handle PhysX fine. Again, it's better to use a single strong card instead of using 2 cards with SLI. You won't get much juice from the second card.Cyberdot

I consider this misinformation.  I agree that dedicated Physx cards are not worth it.  However, SLI is definitely worth it in some situations.  What do you recommend to people who have high-end cards and still want more performance?  Of course SLI is a good option for them.  SLI and Crossfire scale pretty well now, with 60 to 90 percent gains in many games.  

[QUOTE="Cyberdot"]Nope, it isn't. You would be better off getting a decent single card and it will handle PhysX fine. Again, it's better to use a single strong card instead of using 2 cards with SLI. You won't get much juice from the second card.hartsickdiscipl

I consider this misinformation.  I agree that dedicated Physx cards are not worth it.  However, SLI is definitely worth it in some situations.  What do you recommend to people who have high-end cards and still want more performance?  Of course SLI is a good option for them.  SLI and Crossfire scale pretty well now, with 60 to 90 percent gains in many games.  

Yeah, that's an oversimplification for sure. High resolution monitors and multimonitor setups get a huge benefit from SLI.

Regarding the PhysX question I'll echo what most everyone else in the thread is saying in that it's generally not worth it to get a dedicated card IF you are already using an Nvidia card as your primary. I have a dedicated PhysX card, but that's only because my primary video card is an AMD. Also, while I am using a 9800 for PhysX and it works great in most games, some newer titles like Borderlands 2 take a perf hit as a result of turning PhysX on (presumably because I'm using an older card).

-Byshop

[QUOTE="Cyberdot"]Nope, it isn't. You would be better off getting a decent single card and it will handle PhysX fine. Again, it's better to use a single strong card instead of using 2 cards with SLI. You won't get much juice from the second card.hartsickdiscipl

I consider this misinformation.  I agree that dedicated Physx cards are not worth it.  However, SLI is definitely worth it in some situations.  What do you recommend to people who have high-end cards and still want more performance?  Of course SLI is a good option for them.  SLI and Crossfire scale pretty well now, with 60 to 90 percent gains in many games.  

I just bought a 760 cause its alli could afford and am now using my old 560 ti as a dedicated. idea came to me because i couldnt run CoD:Ghosts and a few other games at max settings. so i just threw this in here and configured it for dedicated physx and saw a huge i mean HUGE improvement. im running CoD:Ghosts at max settings pulling 60 frames

I had a 560 Ti and just eventually found a second one for ~$100 to do SLI.

760 alone can easily do 60fps in CoD...