Physx important for gaming???

physx is not that important. Now many games use it and you can always offload back them to CPU if you got some room there, especially since current games are not CPU hungry nowadays.

Really important things are performance, price, and power usage as well as personal preferences.

definately not important. its used in a handful of crappy games. its very gimicky. like my cpu couldnt handle that crap, or my gpu for that matter

PhysX is basically a gimmick right now. There are very, very few games that support GPU accelerated PhysX, only about 20. Of those 20 there are only a small handful of major titles that use it. These include: Mafia II, Batman Arkham Asylum, Batman Arkham City, Metro 2033, and Unreal Tournament 2007. The adoption rate of GPU accelerated PhysX is quite low. Arkham City and Alice: Madness Returns are the only two physX titles I've heard of that have come out this year. GPU driven physics calculations are probably going to show up in the future, but probably using an open standard rather than nvidia's proprietary physX system. Virtually no developers are interested in coding for a feature that can only be used on about half the graphics cards out there.

Question: physx is a graphics effect right? Why does it offloaded to the cpu? So they sent it to dx to convert it and the gpu drivers map it back to the cpu? Its a bunch of maths make it happen why not map it to the gpu?

thats the thing gnomio, it has to be specifically coded into a game. certain features of that game are coded for physx only, even tho anything could do the calcuations. so, without physx, the calculations simply dont get done. its predatory

Thank god Amd or Nvidia didn't put the registered franchise stamp on Tesselation. That wouldve been fun though. Seeing how they try to do each other over via the drivers with it lol. They probably pass it to the cpu giving you a 99 performance drop or something lol

With my last GPU upgrade I went from AMD to Nvidia just to give the phyx a go. Whilst its not avaliable in every game I found in the games that do have it it just gives it that little bit more immersion that you dont get with other games. Things like 20x the amount of sparks the acualty bounce around not being just a simple texture animation, flowing fog and smoke, and well as 1000s of individual peice of debre that build up on the floor, after experiences these, I find the with the physx turned off the game seem more bland and plain. Im not saying I cant live without it but when you find a game that has uses this feature well, Its a very cool experience! Id recommened it.  

Best answer selected by pell380.