[Solved] ATI HD Radeon 5850 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 470

Hello!

im trying to decide, should a get a ATI HD Radeon 5850 or a Nvidia GeForce GTX 470?

im going to be using mostly for gaming, with a I5 750..


But i dont know which one i should go with.... because the Nvidia has the PHYSX but the other one is good to...


please help!

thanks

yogman

Physx is not something important you should count on, but an little add-on since not all games support it.

If you want a little more performance(very little) and do not care about the heat and power usage, and ofc the extra price over the HD 5850 then go for the gtx 470.

If you care about those up, go for the HD 5850.

The GTX 470 benchmarks as being a little faster than the ATI 5850. With newer drivers and optimizations, that lead could spread a little bit.

PhysX is a proprietary thing (it only works with nVidia's products). So if you play a game with PhysX support using an ATI card, you just won't get to activate PhysX. Technically this means you may not get all the eye candy related to PhysX. But there really haven't been a whole lot of games that focused a whole lot on PhysX to be honest, and in those few cases it's definitely not a ground breaking deal.

To be very honest, even I'm sort of on the fence with the GTX 470 and ATI 5850. Both offer great performance. I do honestly lean toward the GTX 470. It's not a huge leap performance wise from the ATI 5850, however does excel specifically with Tessellation (which hopefully will become more predominant over time). The thing to consider is that the GTX 470 is about $50 more than the ATI 5850 (if you match the cheapest of both models). And the 470 is louder, and runs hotters.

If you have a single nVidia card, you can indeed use PhysX, however it will slow down overall performance (lower FPS). The best way to use PhysX is either with an SLI setup (2 nVidia cards) or having two nVidia cards but not SLI. For instance, a GTX 470 for graphics, and an older GTX 260 for dedicated PhysX. This way one GPU does all the PhysX calculations, and the other just does graphical stuff. Ultimately, this is what nVidia would like to see you do (so you buy more stuff).

Quite frankly though, I wouldn't build my system around PhysX because it's not that big of a deal.

ok thanks!

Yes.

LOL Yeah. It's how the GPU / CPU game is played though. Someone gets a step ahead, touts that they're the leader. Then the other guy catches up, gets a step ahead, and claims victory. It's back and forth. Ultimately though, it's good competition and should generally help out the consumer (generally mind you).

Then again, sometimes you get stuff like PhysX, that becomes completely proprietary and really doesn't mean a whole lot. LOL

I say go with the GTX 470 because of increased performance and PhysX compatibility giving you the edge over the 5850 in frames and eye candy. So if your playing a game with PhysX enabled you'll be able to use that but still acting like an ATI card in the process. Not to mention the most recent technology, cooling, and build technique for graphics cards. Although power consumption may be an issue if your PSU isn't high enough... Hope this helps! BTW what resolution will you be gaming on?

but so can i use a GT 240 to run Physx well?

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey