nvidia PhysX with ATI Hardware
Radeon 5850 + GTX 460 2GB
Page 1 / 4 10/02/10
Introduction and Test Setup
PhysX has been around for quite some time. It was originally developed by a company called Ageia (founded in 2002). The whole idea was to utilize a dedicated PhysX Processing Unit (PPU) that would be capable of performing physics calculations in PC video games much faster than a conventional CPU. This would allow game developers to include advanced Physics effects in video games, thereby making their titles visually more attractive and realistic. The idea was initially met with great skepticism and most critics dismissed it as a money making gimmick. Even five or six years after its inception, Ageia PhysX still hadn't become the commodity that its developers had originally envisioned it to be. Ageia PhysX cards were expensive and there were hardly any games that utilized the technology.
In February 2008, nvidia acquired Ageia. Today the PhysX engine is referred to as nvidia PhysX. Thus, it is no surprise that in today's world, it is impossible to run PhysX on nvidia's competitor cards (ATI). Not only that, but by default if an nvidia driver detects the presence of an ATI driver, it automatically disables PhysX acceleration. This means, that if you want to run PhysX you would have to use an nvidia card as the primary GPU. Fortunately, modders have figured out ways to go around this. There is currently a driver mod available that allows you to simultaneously use an ATI and nvidia card, such that the graphics are rendered by the ATI GPU and PhysX runs on dedicated nvidia hardware. Today's article will look into the performance of one such system. It might be worth mentioning this is not Benchmarkextreme's first PhysX investigation. I did a full article on Cryostasis that looked at many features of the Cryostasis engine, including PhysX effects. This article can be read here.
The following setup was utilized for the benchmarks:
I7 920 @ 4.30 GHZ
3 X 2 GB Patriot Viper 1620 MHZ 7-8-8-20
EVGA X58 Motherboard
2 X Gigabyte ATI Radeon 5850 (Catalyst 10.9)
Palit GTX 460 2 GB ( Forceware 258.96)
150 GB 10,000 RPM Velociraptor
Dell 3008wfp 30" LCD
Antec 1200 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
As you can see above, a couple of 5850s in crossfire will serve as the Graphics rendering hardware and PhysX will be run on GTX 460 2GB. The GTX 460 2GB is actually quite an over kill as a PhysX card. Usually, a 9800 GT should suffice and has consistently been one of the most widely used PPUs.
Software Used
I used five PhysX titles for this article
Batman Arkham Asylum
Cryostasis Tech Demo
Dark Void Benchmark
Mafia 2 Demo
Metro 2033
Let us look at some results on the next page.
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