Dedicated Physx using nvidia card
By
Doctor Vivian,
Posted on: 2009-06-04 24:41 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
First, CoX doesn't benefit from NVidia's emulated PhysX.
Second, I heard it's not worth the trouble (for CoX) even if you did get it operational.
Third, I don't know how to get it to work for other applications either, but you might want to check the same place where you heard it from to begin with. I'm sure it is "a pretty good difference" for some games that are designed to use it, but not for CoX.
why is that cox is listed as a game that supports physx - according to forums all the physx card is, is an 8600 GT with no video port so using an 8800 GTX should work just as well if not better. It's not emulated it's dedicated.
I did find out after some googling, how to enable it (done through the control panel for the drivers)
Do you have a physx card? how do you know it's not a "pretty good difference" - forgive my poor wording. Substantial a better word?
Because there have been many similar within the past year about this very topic that came to these conclusions:
- CoX does support PhysX.. to an extent. The CoX program only recognizes the Aegia PhysX hardware. NVidia's software emulation of PhysX will not work correctly for CoX. (Yes, it's emulation. Many of the video cards were designed and released far before the PhysX was enabled on them. Regardless if you dedicate a card to PhysX or not, it's still not an actual PhysX processor, and CoX doesn't recognize it and wont let you enable it in the options.)
- People with actual Aegia cards have said there isn't much of a difference, and even those who said there was a slight difference stated it wasn't worth the cost of the extra card, especially with today's fast multi-core processors able to pick up the slack with ease.
Like I said, it might be worth it for other applications that will make better use of it, but not for CoH.
If I'm wrong, I'm sorry... So far I don't see anybody speaking up to correct me though, and it's rare on these boards for incorrect information to last very long without criticism, so I'm assuming I understood and explained the situation in a decent way.
CoH/V's implementation of PhysX was one of the first and as such was built using a custom software library from Ageia that worked with their PhysX processor. As a result the game didn't even support upgrades from Ageia back in the days before nVidia bought them out, as Ageia changed how their library works, relying on the custom library found in the CoH/V main folder.
While later games used the newer library code from Ageia, that nVidia leveraged with their GPU accelerated PhysX drivers, CoH/V was simply to old, to much an early adopter to take advantage of this.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
well according to anandtech - as of i7 the physx card added up to 80% peformance increase scaling to CPU.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2828
[ QUOTE ]
well according to anandtech - as of i7 the physx card added up to 80% peformance increase scaling to CPU.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2828
[/ QUOTE ] Again, that page is referring to actual AEGIA hardware. Like I said, NVidia emulation will not work, and that page says nothing about it working (and can't because that was written while NVidia emulation was still being working on).
Also, that same page also says:
"The PhysX card is only useful up to the point where it's offloaded all the physics processing it can. Past that the bottleneck remains the CPU", which means the improvements to performance are mostly dependent on the rest of your system being able to keep up with it as well.
For CoX.. it would be up to the Dev's to write it into the code to recognize the NVidia emulation, and it's been asked for many times. It seems unimportant or lower priority thus far. I'm not saying it will never happen... but for what you are asking, it's currently not possible, and most likely not worth your time/money (unless you are using it for a different game/application).
[ QUOTE ]
well according to anandtech - as of i7 the physx card added up to 80% peformance increase scaling to CPU.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2828
[/ QUOTE ]
PhysX card and software emulation support added to CoH/V Issue 7, June 2006
AnandTech article from September 2006
nVidia buys Ageia February 2008
nVidia releases first video card driver with PhysX emulation on the GPU, August 2008
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
Yep, Mateo and Xmas are 100% correct, this is a dead horse that has been beaten many many times.
I am sorry you got your hopes up, but your plan will not work, period.
One day they may fix the drivers, but until then...
The 200 series nVidia cards are hardware supported PhysX, not emulated. I think the 100 series had the emulated though.
It doesn't matter really until NCSoft decides to rewrite the PhysX engine in CoX (if they ever do) to support the new API, but it's nice for the newer games.
No, PhysX is a CUDA application. It's software running on the graphics card while the original PhysX PPU was an actual processor designed to do specific physics motion calculations in hardware.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
I had a PhysX 100 card. It made the system a bit unstable, and after locking up once too many times in the middle of a big fight and having to reboot, I took it out. The difference with a fast Extreme Edition Core 2 Duo was so minimal I realized it was a waste of a slot.
When I upgraded my 640MB 8800 GTS to a 1GB 280 GTX with PhysX and CUDA, naturally I too thought that I would get a lot more PhysX in COH, as it is vastly more capable than the old PhysX 100 card ever was. COH doesn't give it a workout even with all settings at maximum and running at 2650x1600.
But I didn't get anything more, even though I always have my Physics set to maximum, it just uses the CPU to calculate them. Like Shadow said, it seems that until NCsoft integrates the new NVidia PhysX API into the game client, nothing but the old hardware will be supported.
Maybe in Issue 16-17? *^_^* Or am I being too optimistic?
-- Vivian
I understand you can use a second nvidia card as a dedicated physx processor - so if I were to run my gtx285 and 8800gtx - how would I go about dedicating the 8800 as physx? From what I have read on various boards - it is a pretty good difference.