Does PhysX matters?

Certain games won't run with out the software. ie. metro 2033. it doesnt matter if you have a radeon card or not. you can down load the physx software from the nvidea sight.

PhysX is just an added wow factor to some games , its not really that important, its up to your personal taste really and if it grabs you.
Some people love it , others hate it as it can drop your framerates and performance.
some titles support it but not a vast majority, to be quite honest you aren't missing out too much.

GPU accelerated PhysX is a meaningful addition is approximately 5 games IMO. Of those the ones you are most likely to play at this point are the Batman games and Mafia 2.

check youtube to get a feel for what games look like with and without physx, personally I think it adds a lot to the games that support it, but the list is short, and if I was in the market and found an AMD card cheaper that gets a similar FPS then I would likely go for that.

In and of itself PhysX is in my opinion not a reason to buy one card over another.

Mactronix  

Right now it dosn't matter since there are so few games , but when it becomes popular and more than 50% of games support it then AMD will do something about it to support it or they will lose market share.

What makes you think it will get more popular? It has been around for many years and there has been no discernible increase in adoption rate. That current cards all have computeshaders and can use OpenCL which can do the same without only working on Nvidia cards makes it extremely unlikely PhysX is going to become any sort of standard like you suggest.

Kinda like the difference between a plain burger at a fast food joining and a Big Mac or a Whopper ....same thing ....but "more stuff". Toms Hardware reviews said basically that once ya turn it on and go "wow", you ain't gonna turn it off. I look at it this way.....if given the choice between :

a) a hamburger
b) a hamburger with cheese and all the "fixins"

most will take option b)

But forget what we say, just look at the video here and decide for yaself:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/batman_arkham_asylu...

As far as "popularity" goes, ATI kicked butt with the 58xx series taking advantage of nVidia's production problems woth the 4xx series..... but comparing the 69xx series to the 5xx series which basically comprise the $200 and up segment, the nVidia cards (if visits to steam's servers are any measure), are outselling the ATI's about 2.5 to 1.0.

Current Market Share hitting Steam Servers

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 - 5.69%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 - 3.47%
ATI Radeon HD 6950 - 3.28%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 - 2.85%
ATI Radeon HD 6970 - 1.52%

Before green team fanboys get exited, the 5770 has the largest market share of any DX11 card w/ 16.26% .... the 460 is 2nd w/ 11.78%

And if you play the Batman games and Mafia 2 all the time then what your saying would matter. If not then it just doesn't matter.

Thanks but I think its very relative to nvidia's sponsorship for game developers and
others platforms like Havok seems so weak against Ageia's PhysX.
Then again AMD must do more with its GAMING EVOLVED.
I like ATi for years and dont like it goes the way the Bulldozer is going.
And NVIDIA sell its bottom line GPUs for those want to activate PhysX on Radeon chips.
kinda shame....

I'm not saying it will all I'm saying is that by 50% of games supporting it will force AMD to do something and I said that because the person originating this post has an AMD card and was concerned about missing out. Naturaly if games do not support it there will be nothing to worry about.

As said before by JackNaylorPE, it does make a difference, in the game itself and performance wise.

Does every game use it? No, but why not have it? Many good AAA and Indie games do.

Also, when buying a video card, you should look at...

Value (how much FPS for how much $$$)

Programs offered ( for example, Nvidia has Physxx, the best stereoscopic 3D support, and the best 3x monitor support)

Driver support (ATI can't make a real driver to save their life, you always end up with 3rd party drivers that bearly "work". Nvidia on the other hand is very professional with drivers.)

Physical Card Quality (Both nvidia and ATI have good / bad quality manufacturers)

So in the end, Nvidia has better eye candy support (Physx, 3D, and multimonitor capabilities), better driver support, and good quality manufacturers on par with ATI.

Now to the value (Price / performance) ATI used to have this on lockdown, but over past couple years ATI has lost it. Nvidia cards produce nearly equal performance (or more) compared to equally priced ATI cards.

Sometimes you can save 20 or 30 bucks with ATI, sometimes though you can save 20 or 30 bucks with nvidia. In the end the difference isn't enough to make up for ATI's lack of good features and driver support.

Just stick with Nvidia and be happy.

Agreed

Is it important ? yes in games that support it. I was playing a game that supports it, I hit a tree the tree fell incorrectly in an 100% impossible way and it looked stupid. Physx can prevent that.

somethings with ATi/AMD cards are really strange.
like nvidia and its CUDA that adobe uses with its MPE
ATi has less contracts if Im not wrong. they use VLIW and seems kinda failure for most applications 'Cause they are CUDA friendly.
Quadro vs FirePro almost a winner too.

for years i like AMD instead of intel and ATi instead of NVIDIA even before AMD bought ATi also I hate the word fanboy....

These days Ive learned something simple and important
the horsepower of a piece of hardware is not important unless that matched with OS and software.
I wish I could find an answer for my question...it seems there is not so far  

Or maybe jaguarskx 's answer is the best Ive seen into the internet so far.
Thank you all. I enjoyed your answers.

Best answer selected by return.

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey