How will having a dedicated phys card help me?

Solution
for 3d design, rendering and editing, you will get absolutely no benefit from a physx card, as none of those things use physx, only games use physx. Some 3d design and rendering programs can take advantage of a graphics card to assist processing (more-so the 3d design). Give us a list of programs your using, and your current system specs, and we can help you pick a card that will aid your productivity.

Eximo

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Not sure PhysX is used outside of games very much.

Most high-end cards are slowed down with a dedicated PhysX card that is slower then the primary. It has to wait for data from the other card before rendering frames. Generally the primary card can do both jobs quicker on its own.

When using SLI, you set only one card to perform PhysX, but these are generally identical cards and it has to be one or the other.

They did sell some cards with built in dedicated PhysX but that was shortlived.
 
You will get roughly a 25% performance boost with a good dedicated PhysX card, BUT only on GPU-accelerated PhysX games. The dedicated PhysX card frees up your primary card for just handling graphics work, while the PhysX card just does physics calculations using its CUDA processing cores.

A dedicated PhysX card needs to be an Nvidia card. Your primary card should be from Nvidia as well, although there is an old driver hack that might allow you to pair a dedicated Nvidia PhysX card with a primary AMD card.

Here is the list of GPU-accelerated PhysX games. You will only see a boost when playing these games, and will not receive a benefit under any other circumstance with a dedicated PhysX card. And again, you will only receive a boost when the PhysX card is sufficiently powerful to aid the primary card, rather than slow it down.
http://www.physxinfo.com/
 
for 3d design, rendering and editing, you will get absolutely no benefit from a physx card, as none of those things use physx, only games use physx. Some 3d design and rendering programs can take advantage of a graphics card to assist processing (more-so the 3d design). Give us a list of programs your using, and your current system specs, and we can help you pick a card that will aid your productivity.
 
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g335

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I am building a pc with a AMD 8350. Not sure what gpu will have. I plan on using a 1980x1080p monitor, maybe higher.
I will use Lightwave, Photoshop, Illustrator, Retas, not sure which video editing suite yet. Later might buy Maya
 
I believe Nvidia cards have hardware accelleration support for photoshop, not sure about the others. But if you buy a low end card it might not be any better than rendering using your cpu, which is quite powerful for the mentioned tasks.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firepro-v3900-review-benchmark,3153-6.html
it looks like lightwave works ok with an amd 6570 or better, nvidia equivelant would be a gtx650 i guess........ For maya looks like you would want something a bit beefier. How much are you looking to spend on the graphics card?