Radeon 5870 + A Dedicated PhysX Card?

[lunghater]

Hey everyone. I purchased a Radeon 5870 and I'm currently waiting for it to be shipped to me. I was reading reviews on Newegg for the brand I bought (Gigabyte), and saw that one guy had said he is using his 5870 plus an old EVGA 8800GTS he had lying around as a dedicated PhysX card.

This got me interested, since I'm using an 8800GTS right now, and it would be cool to still put it to some kind of use in my new build.

I'm just looking for clarification as to how exactly I would set this up, and what are some of the benefits that I would get from doing this?

All help is appreciated guys.

 

[Annisman]

It would be hard to setup, and even harder to get the right drivers installed and running without conflict with each other, not to mention the OS has alot to do with availablity of ATI + Physx.

Honestly, just enjoy your 5870 as the fastest single gpu on the planet, and don't worry about Physx, the only title that makes it look interesting is Batman.

 

[bige420]

I heard that you were able to do this in the past but im pretty sure Nvidia fixed it with their new drivers so that you cant. I would imagine it might be possible if you were using older drivers for the 8800GTS.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/3DGAMEMAN#p/u/7/DIJvURKtK1k

 

[lunghater]

Actually guys, through a lot of digging around I found that it is still possible with some hacked drivers. I also found though that it would be pointless for me to pursue considering I don't play any of the games on the short list of the ones that support PhysX.

However, if anyone had the same question as me and is looking for some help just message me.

 

[rodney_ws]

Nvidia frowns upon this and will likely make this a difficult setup to keep running. Drivers break functionality... hackers hack drivers... repeat repeat repeat. Kinda like having iTunes on your Palm Pre... it might work today... it might not tomorrow.

 

[L1qu1d]

wait for it to work don't u just need to install the physX package and Nvidia drivers? It should work logically.

I still have my 285 GTX I'll give it a shot when I have the chance!

 

[JofaMang]

Any drivers newer than 186 will not allow a dedicated PhysX GPU to operate in the presence of an ATI card. I recently went through the headache of getting my 4870 to play along with a 9600GSO, but took the gso out and put it in an HTPC parts pile. When I did get it to work with older drivers, while very pretty, it was so punishing to my framerate it wasn't worth it for me(went from 75+ fps in Batman AA to 25ish with PhysX being the only different setting) perhaps using a better nvidia card (like a 275/85) as a dedicated PhysX card will prevent this sort of crippling, but that was too rich for my blood. Add on top of that, if you choose to only use old drivers (as i had to, xp64 would not allow me to use the hacked ones) then you are basically frozen in time as far as PhysX drivers go.
I'm glad I only paid $30 for the GSO, heh, and I have another home to put it into.

 

[shadow187]

There was a hacked nVidia driver for 196, I believe, that allows to it work. The only OS that supports this type of dual-driver is Windows 7, I guess, from what Jofa posted.

 

[JofaMang]

Apparently XP 32bit is ok with unsigned drivers, my only experience was only with xp64, which rejected the installation of any of the hacked drivers that have been released. From my understanding, Vista is a no go at all for this, and any version of windows 7 will play along. I might give it another go in the new build in January (will be w7u64) but until thats all i can really contribute.