Dedicated PhysX card support

[Hanjo]

Dedicated PhysX card support

Is there a chance that TW3 will profit from a dedicated PhysX card performance-wise? E.g. with a dedicated GTX670 to the main GTX970? There seems to have been an 'official' statement some time ago (in 2013, and yes I know a lot can change within the span of two years) that GPU PhysX would be supported (see e.g. http://physxinfo.com/news/11558/the-witcher-3-will-support-gpu-physx-now-officially/), but a recent post by Andrew Burnes from NVIDIA said no, TW3 will feature only CPU PhysX (see http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-is-your-system-ready#comment-2026539819). I'd much appreciate to get an up-to-date statement from you guys at CDPR on this account.Thanks in advance!

 

[NoBlackThunder]

i know you can set the physx setting for a dedicated nvidia gpu or to your cpu. but i am not sure how hair works go into physx these days :/ .. so the answer is maybe. thats somthing that needs to be tested. Tho you can have 2 different nvidia cards (without sli ) or one amd card and an nvida card ( maybe ???? ) to run it dedicated for physx computations theoretical. and with that you could just buy a way cheaper 750 ++ card for physx. but that's something i can not guarantee for. its just an idea

http://puu.sh/hPZ6K/242fc4ee88.png

 

[gtcarlson]

Yeah I'm wondering this too as I have a spare 560ti laying around, I'll probably wait to see what people say to try it out though.

 

[Mato87]

You're fine with gtx 670 being a dedicated physx card, it is a bit of an overkill, believe me even an older dedicated graphics card like 9800 gtx or lesser card would do just fine, although a gtx 670 is a better choice because of the lower power consumption
I myself will be using the two gtx 970's in sli so hopefully the driver will select the second card as a dedicated physx processor

 

[Hanjo]

You're fine with gtx 670 being a dedicated physx card, it is a bit of an overkill, believe me even an older dedicated graphics card like 9800 gtx or lesser card would do just fine, although a gtx 670 is a better choice because of the lower power consumption
I myself will be using the two gtx 970's in sli so hopefully the driver will select the second card as a dedicated physx processor

Then at least I can expect the GTX670 not to bottleneck the system . I've got it spare from my last upgrade, so even if it'll be somewhat underoccupied with it's job, I won't mind.

@NoBlackThunder: I'll try the different PhysX settings in the NVIDIA control panel to check which (if any) effects they have on framerates.

 

[gtcarlson]

You're fine with gtx 670 being a dedicated physx card, it is a bit of an overkill, believe me even an older dedicated graphics card like 9800 gtx or lesser card would do just fine, although a gtx 670 is a better choice because of the lower power consumption
I myself will be using the two gtx 970's in sli so hopefully the driver will select the second card as a dedicated physx processor

I would assume the 2 970's in SLI would give much better performance than one being dedicated to physx as your second 970 would be running at like 20%. That being said though from everything I can find it's CPU physx, a dedicated card will have no impact on performance because all of the physx tasks will be handled by the CPU. It appears at least for now a dedicated card for the Witcher 3 will just make heat and noise.

 

[Sapath]

Witcher 3 will not benefit from having a dedicated PhsyX card.

Source:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=164340920&postcount=760

Guy works for Nvidia.

 

[Hanjo]

That being said though from everything I can find it's CPU physx, a dedicated card will have no impact on performance because all of the physx tasks will be handled by the CPU. It appears at least for now a dedicated card for the Witcher 3 will just make heat and noise

Yes, you may be right there; that's why it would be nice to hear from the horse's mouth whether such a setup is just a waste of time and energy at this time, and if yes whether that might change with some future update. I guess there will be a few more here who have an older card gathering dust and could put it to good use if there was GPU PhysX support in TW3.

---------- Updated at 10:06 PM ----------

Witcher 3 will not benefit from having a dedicated PhsyX card.

Source:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=164340920&postcount=760

Guy works for Nvidia.

A shame (not that he works for NVIDIA, that is).

 

[Mato87]

I would assume the 2 970's in SLI would give much better performance than one being dedicated to physx as your second 970 would be running at like 20%. That being said though from everything I can find it's CPU physx, a dedicated card will have no impact on performance because all of the physx tasks will be handled by the CPU. It appears at least for now a dedicated card for the Witcher 3 will just make heat and noise.

That is correct, so I take it back, it's a shame witcher 3 developers decided to go this way with bounding some of the physx features to the cpu....

 

[Zat0ichi]

You're fine with gtx 670 being a dedicated physx card, it is a bit of an overkill, believe me even an older dedicated graphics card like 9800 gtx or lesser card would do just fine

Not the case.
I thought that was how it worked but a 970 has 1664 CUDAcore , 770 1400 and a 660 about 1000
A 9800 has 128 so its not bringing much to the party.
I bought a silent 9800 for exactly that purpose and it made performance worse. Not sure which card it was, probably the 770.
I never looked into exactly why but I spent an hour messing with the Metro benchmark and I was getting a performance drop off when using the 9800.
Seems like its a moot point as physx is not GPU bound in this game.
I think 560 + would help or any card with comparable clock speeds