Physx question vs AMD

DragonChase · May 22, 2013

First of all i would like to say hi to all members, I am new on this forum and am a reader for a long time.

The reason I am posting this thread is because I have noticed the topics about Nvidia’s Physx are out of date or are too unclear on the subject.
I would like to buy a decent graphics card even though I am not much of a gamer, I am planning to buy GTA 5 for PC and play Planetside 2 from time to time. Aside from playing games I have specialized tasks my PC must handle and have always preferred an AMD videocard because it simply outperforms Nvidia on all fronts (given the tasks I perform).

Because this PC will be for private use, I do have the choice to go Nvidia but I have major concerns regarding Physx. As I have noticed the market has changed allot regarding this subject.

My questions:
- Is Physx like any other setting (example: AA) meaning that when turned on the performance will drop.
- Do I have the option to choose Physx to be ran on the CPU instead.
- Links of benchmarks of a AMD vs NVIDIA with Physx turned on would be nice to see.
- Since my processor will be the fastest available wouldn’t it be better to go with an AMD card, because as far as I know AMD processes physics in the CPU rather than the GPU.

I have read this topic: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1682247/nvidia-amd-build.html

What to know:
- I have read several topics on this website .
- I have read NVIDIA’s website.
- I am an experienced man in IT, hardware wise and developer wise.

- Rather have Physx off for performance, if it does not take away too much performance then it’s fine to have it on.

System:
- i7 – 4770k Haswell (will be overclocked to 4.5Ghz)
- z78 Sabertooth Motherboard (Haswell supported)
- Zalman air cooler or Corsair water cooled system.
- Fastest Ram 16GB
- Videocard’s of choice: Radeon 7950 Asus/ XFX or GTX 670
- SSD 128GB Samsung 840
- 1 TB HDD
- Power supply 650 watt

Money is not an issue, logic is.

manofchalk · May 22, 2013

Yes, PhysX is like other settings in that if you ramp it up performance will decrease.
You do, but due to how PhysX is calculated using Parallel Computing, which GPU's do far better than CPU's, you get far worse performance than running off a card.
See above, the CPU grunt doesnt really matter when it comes to CPU PhysX performance.

IMO, PhysX is kind of a gimmick, too few games support it for it to really be a big factor. And while right now its fairly small time, AMD's TressFX could become a competitor to PhysX.

4745454b · May 22, 2013

As I nearly always do I'm going to speak in general terms.

First, there are two forms of PhysX. PhysX itself is just a physics engine like Havok. This is ran on the CPU and is a part of the game engine. Anything x86/x64 can run it. Not a problem. The other form of PhysX is GPU accelerated PhsyX. This is where the problems come in. In order to run this your GPU needs to be able to handle CUDA. This means you need an Nvidia GPU. They do give you the ability to run it on the CPU but most of the time it wont' run well. (Mainly because Nvidia doesn't allow the CPU to run the code with modern Instruction Sets.) You said the articles are outdated, but there still aren't many games that use accelerated PhsyX. And of the ones that do, most of them don't use it very well. Unfortunately I hear PS2 does make good use of it so I can see your problem. I personally don't play any of the accelerated games so PhysX means nothing to me. You are going to have to decide if you want the AMD GPU that "simply outperforms Nvidia on all fronts (given the tasks I perform)", or if you want the Nvidia GPU to do the PhysX in the games you want to play. This is really a personal choice, no one can make it for you.

Links of benchmarks of a AMD vs NVIDIA with Physx turned on would be nice to see.

Seeing as AMD can't run the accelerated code their score would be zero. Or very low if you have the CPU do it as it will be busy doing PhysX calculations and not sending data to the GPU. The Nvidia card will always win. Most games see a small hit turning on PhysX, at least on the bigger cards. The GTX670 will see very little drop in performance with PhysX on vs off. I'd link a review, but can't seem to find one. Perhaps someone else knows of one.

DragonChase · May 22, 2013

manofchalk :

Nice, thank you very much!! I did not know of TressFX, this really frustrates PC users but hey.. I am really happy AMD is working on its own software.

Still would like to see some benchmarks with AMD vs NVIDIA.

If you are able to use an old 9800GT for the Physx then Physx doesnt use much processing power or am i underestimating the case here?.

manofchalk · May 22, 2013

If you decide to use a dedicated PhysX card, it needs to be decently powerful otherwise it can drag performance down lower than just the primary (Nvidia only, cant slot a PhysX card into a system with a primary AMD card, which is ridiculous IMO) doing all the work. Considering that the 9800GT is equivalent to a GT240, suspect you would need a stronger card. Would say maybe a 550Ti/560ti if you want to be assured it wont bring down performance.

mcnumpty23 · May 22, 2013

when i had the choice between gtx670 and 7970

i went 7970 in the end

reasons were not enough games used physx

and some that did had problems with physx running --arkham asylum for one

plus opencl may be usefull in the future and amd cards look to be usefull there

and if using software that leverages the compute power of the gpu-- amd kills the new nvidia cards like gtx670

theres an article on that somwhere on toms

the only game i have seen tressfx so far is tomb raider

and using it gave a hefty fps drop

main advantage of the gtx670 was its more power efficient

DragonChase · May 22, 2013

Thank you for the replies, my question has been answered but i can't pick a solution because all the replies have helped me equally.

k1114 · May 22, 2013

Tressfx will never be a rival because it is not a physics engine. It is just for hair rendering, hence why they named it tressfx. Also it's not frustrating because it works on both amd and nvidia.

You can use a physx card with amd but it's unofficial since it's a mod.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Borderlands-2-PhysX-Performance-and-PhysX-Comparison-GTX-680-and-HD-7970/GPU- Here's one for borderlands 2. Though it is weird cpu usage doesn't change. But keep in mind, no physx benchmark is amd vs nvidia since it's cpu vs gpu. You can see there is actually a pretty big hit from low vs high physx.

4745454b · May 22, 2013

k1114, I'd be more interested to see what the GTX670 can do with PhysX off/low/med/hi. That would give us an idea what turning it on will do to frame rates. This will also depend on the game used.

OP, you said the question has been answered, what did you decide? PhysX or better GPU calculations?

k1114 · May 22, 2013

http://physxinfo.com/news/9653/borderlands-2-physx-benchmark-roundup/ When I was searching for benchmarks, I found this roundup of all the borderland physx benchmarks, which is where I found that original link. You could look through those. Different implentations in games do differ a lot but I'm sure you know that. Google comes up with a lot.

Wendigo · May 22, 2013

DragonChase :

Yes. But the performance drop will depend on the game, the GPU, the CPU. With a mid-range 600 series GPU you should see a visible hit when benchmarking but irrelevant during gameplay. So, now, with modern hardware the performance hit isn't the drwaback it was in the 200 series days.

DragonChase :

Yes, But, as others said, there's no point in doing this. The performance of CPU PhysX is bad.

DragonChase :

Since AMD card doesn't support GPu-accelarated PhysX, you can't compare nVidia and AMD with PhysX.

DragonChase :

This is exactly what you should do with your hardware.

Now, it really depends on the game you want to play. The argument that not many games support PhysX is somewhat meaningless. If it just happens that even one of your games support PhysX, it becomes quite meaninful for you. And, usually, when you play one these games with PhysX turn on, you don't want to go back and play with PhysX off.

Since you already plan to have two games supporting hardware accelerated -PhysX, I would certainly favor a nVidia GPU over an AMD one.

mcnumpty23 · May 22, 2013

guess it comes down to

whats more important to the op

some extra eye candy in some games?

or taking a lot longer to do the specialized tasks they mentioned?

i assume specialized tasks means leveraging the gpu compute power

in that case to me its a no brainer--finish the tasks faster--more time for gaming--my old 5850 probably still has more

compute power than a gtx670

smeezekitty · May 22, 2013

I agree. If you are doing something specialized that prefers AMD GPUs, it would seem to be the obvious choice vs one physx game.

jk47 · May 22, 2013

manofchalk :

I'm aware AMD played it off as a feature exclusive to AMD cards for tomb raider - but I turned it on with my Nvidia card and it worked the same. So I don't think this is exclusive to AMD cards..?

On the other-hand PhysX is designed to only be compatible with Nvidia GPU's, to the best of my knowledge...

edit: Yes, at launch TressFX ran too poorly on Nvidia cards. But at first patch, it runs the same as AMD. I had read an article on release, that TR was in cahoots with AMD, and TR didn't give Nvidia the final build of the game until right before release. Nvidia was caught off-guard and didn't have enough time to fix glitches and TressFX.

DragonChase · May 22, 2013

I am trying to invest in a private system for atleast 5 years, hence the haswell waiting, the overclocking features and the high budget.
Assuming like it has always been, a card switch every 2 years is expected, but I am patient (learned patience after years of programming).

For my specific tasks I need high calculating cores called ALU cores (mathematical), AMD excels in this and has atleast 3 times more then NVIDIA will ever have.

Also i have noticed that AMD cards can perform longer because of the easier overclocking and just without that, you are able to prolong its useage because you can turn off weird effects making it more efficient for the future. Meaning that AMD can handle the same amount of FPS better then NVIDIA with effects turned off like AA and Physx.

As a programmer I was really interested if the NVIDIA would perform well with Physx and if it would be worth it. I run complex integer calculations almost constantly all day long and my private system would be my backup system next to the firepro's and FPGA cards.

Sinds I have my head wrapped in code for years I would appreciate the fact that I could reward myself with a decent system and try to have some time for gaming.

It is more of a reward to myself, because after I have build atleast 4000 systems and helped comapies worldwide, I haven't built one for myself (shame on me).

Thank you all for the wonderful replies, all is appreciated, I can declare myself a full member of this forum and you will see me more often here.

Cheers!

17seconds · May 22, 2013

www.physxinfo.com
is the best website for PhysX info, not surprisingly. As noted, they scour the web for as many benchmarks on all the games that use GPU-accelerated PhysX. In general, the latest generation of GTX 600 series cards can handle most every PhysX game with high enough framerates to enable PhysX at its highest setting. There is some indication that the GTX 780, based on the GK110 GPU will handle compute tasks much better than the previous GTX 680, so that may be a compromise solution.

As always, be sure to check out some videos of PhysX ON vs. OFF so that you know what the payoff/tradeoff will be. The popular PhysX games list includes: the Batman: Arkham series, Borderlands 2, Metro Last Light, Planetside 2, Mafia 2, Hawken, and an old favorite, Unreal Tournament 3.

Here's Planetside 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qhaEghJ74
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLqpx7l7-Ag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytavYWNjcew

DragonChase · May 27, 2013

Thank you all, finish the topic! I have chosen a Saphire 7950 3gb Vapor-X OC + Crysis 3 + Bioshock + Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. It is 100 Euro's cheaper then the same performance NVIDIA after a price drop.I have decide thanks to you guys that Physx is not worth it.

mcnumpty23 · May 27, 2013

DragonChase :

if you pick a best answer it will mark the topic as solved

4745454b · May 27, 2013

I went with the Gigabyte one. Similar performance to the GTX670, good performance overall, and two games I might even care about. Pretty good deal if you ask me. Though I admit if you play PhysX games or you care about Nvidia's bundle then the GTX670 probably looks better. Isn't choice great?

if you pick a best answer it will mark the topic as solved

And then I can do the other part of my "job".

Physx question vs AMD

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