PhysX in Borderlands 2

Dang, that's nice. Wonder what kind of performance hit we're looking at, though. Making me consider switching from the red team to the green team just for this.
 
Parja said:
Dang, that's nice. Wonder what kind of performance hit we're looking at, though. Making me consider switching from the red team to the green team just for this.
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I am very interested as well. I'll probably be running gtx 480 + 8800gtx for the first bit until the nvidia 700's come out, and then put the 480 down as the physx card. :)
 
Says the video is private...

And damn, I need to cook the dead 8800GT I have lying around now.
 
Video is private, but i'm guessing it was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rokcD0nh4I

Sorta neat, I suppose. The tiny fragments of shit flying everywhere normally don't do it for me, but it was sort of cool when the grenades picked them up. The cloth and liquid effects looked nice too.
 
Being an AMD owner I'm a bit annoyed about this. Previous versions of hardware PhysX have been terribly optimized for CPU (not multi-threaded) to the point that even low physx is unplayable unless you have an Nvidia card. Apparently developers can do extra work to counter this, but they never do.

The 3.0 version of the SDK is supposed to add improved, automatic multi-threading on the CPU, which could be nice. Unfortunately I poked around and found out that Borderlands 2 still uses the 2.8.4 version of the SDK. So unless we get really lucky, AMD users will be SOL in terms of physx in the game :/

Honestly, I find a lot of the debris/particle effects look rather poor (not lit properly), but the cloth and water effects I would really, really like to enjoy in the game :( And I have a six-core Phenom II x6 so most of my CPU cores will probably be sitting around bored when they could be computing physics :mad:
 
PhysX on cpu's is almost always going to be crap. CPU's just can't perform the floating point calculations needed for it anywhere near as quick as a gpu. The only solution for red team people would be to run physx on the gpu, which some games allow (although with crap performance). Not sure if it is green team sabotaging the physx code so AMD cards run it like crap or AMD stubbornly holding out for opencl and refusing to optimize for physx. Either way, I really want to trade in my 6970 to someone for a 670 or 680 (or hell maybe a 660ti)
 
I'm excited. I have a GTX 275 paired up with my Radeon 6970 solely for PhysX titles such as this.
 
I went from 2 gtx 460 768mb in sli to one gtx 660 Ti. Do you guys think it is a good idea to keep one of the 460s for a dedicated physx card for Borderlands 2? My only concern is that will for force the 660 Ti to run a 8x pci-e instead of 16x.

Thanks
 
Hmm it would be good if you kept one of them, even with a 660 with all those physics it will be a heavy duty. Or sell them both and get another 660 :p
 
Diseaseboy said:
I went from 2 gtx 460 768mb in sli to one gtx 660 Ti. Do you guys think it is a good idea to keep one of the 460s for a dedicated physx card for Borderlands 2? My only concern is that will for force the 660 Ti to run a 8x pci-e instead of 16x.

Thanks
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Not really a ton of difference between x16 and x8 perfomance wise from what I have seen.
 
I can second that no performance difference from x16 to x8 (tested when I put my GTX 690 in and put in a GTX 550 Ti for physX)
 
I'm curious as to what the performance hit for PhysX in Borderlands 2 is. If it's anything like Arkham City, I'm gonna find myself buying another 680 just to keep everything maxed out at 1080p
 
I'm wondering what the performance hit is as well, AC takes a big hit at 1080p+.
 
So I just realized I can do hybrid physx... I'm using an AMD card as my primary, but I've got an old GeForce 9600 GSO lying around. Would I just be crippling myself with that?
 
I'm tempted to attempt hybrid physX just for BL2 since the demos seem cool. Would something like a 640 be suitable alongside a 7970? I actually already have a GTS250 sitting around, but my impression is that would be a little on the slow side, plus its much more power hungry than a 640 would be
 
Activate: AMD said:
I'm tempted to attempt hybrid physX just for BL2 since the demos seem cool. Would something like a 640 be suitable alongside a 7970? I actually already have a GTS250 sitting around, but my impression is that would be a little on the slow side, plus its much more power hungry than a 640 would be
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The 640 has shown to be quite a dog as a PhysX card. Many suspect the slow DDR3 memory to be the main culprit, so the DDR5 in the new 650 should make it much more competitive. I'm considering buying one to see how well it works.

As far as an established dedicated PhysX card in a similar price range, probably better to go with something in the 550Ti or 460 family at the moment.

I'd give the GTS250 a try, though. It should be decent as a PhysX card.
 
Parja said:
The 640 has shown to be quite a dog as a PhysX card. Many suspect the slow DDR3 memory to be the main culprit, so the DDR5 in the new 650 should make it much more competitive. I'm considering buying one to see how well it works.

As far as an established dedicated PhysX card in a similar price range, probably better to go with something in the 550Ti or 460 family at the moment.

I'd give the GTS250 a try, though. It should be decent as a PhysX card.
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Nice! if you do post up some results if you can. Also question maybe beat to death, but, I'm on a Z77 sabertooth, if I wanted a Physx dedicated card and go SLI, could I pull that off with a Sandy?

(Gonna go look myself too, I wonder if there are enough lanes)
 
Is hybrid physx better now than it was back in '09? I tried hybrid physx on my 4890 with an 8800gtx 512mb back when Windows 7 first came out and it was a pain to get it to work and stay working and that was before Nvidia put stops in place to try and prevent it.
 
Mosher said:
Nice! if you do post up some results if you can. Also question maybe beat to death, but, I'm on a Z77 sabertooth, if I wanted a Physx dedicated card and go SLI, could I pull that off with a Sandy?

(Gonna go look myself too, I wonder if there are enough lanes)
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I'll give it a shot. Unfortunately, I'm down a PSU right now, with my main rig using an undersized transplant, so plugging in another power hungry GPU is going to have to wait. I'm glad Corsair honored my RMA so quickly, but did they have to ship it back to me using the slowest UPS method ever?
 
Does the physx card need to be dedicated?

I currently use an AMD 6870 as my primary but also have an 8800GT in my machine to push an extra two monitors (I have 4)

Not sure how that would work, if I would have to disable the monitors, or if it would be able to be used already.
 
I got to go hands-on with Borderlands 2 at the Gearbox community day on Saturday and I am happy to report that the PhysX usage is very much unlike Arkham City. The PC demo stations running PhysX were using a single GeForce GTX 660Ti cards and were running flawlessly at 1080p. When I asked a member of the Dev team about PhysX implimentation, he said that it's the best implimentation yet.
 
Mosher said:
Nice! if you do post up some results if you can. Also question maybe beat to death, but, I'm on a Z77 sabertooth, if I wanted a Physx dedicated card and go SLI, could I pull that off with a Sandy?

(Gonna go look myself too, I wonder if there are enough lanes)
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I don't think this game is really going to need a dedicated card. Considering a 660 can handle high physx in its own... anything you've got going in SLI should be powerful enough to not require a 3rd card.
 
Viper87227 said:
I don't think this game is really going to need a dedicated card. Considering a 660 can handle high physx in its own... anything you've got going in SLI should be powerful enough to not require a 3rd card.
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Nice, so if I do move to a 2560x1440 / 1600 display, I can probably still handle it with SLI or maybe even one card (Got a mild OC on the 670 FTW). I am going to play the heck outa this game lol.
 
Mosher said:
Nice, so if I do move to a 2560x1440 / 1600 display, I can probably still handle it with SLI or maybe even one card (Got a mild OC on the 670 FTW). I am going to play the heck outa this game lol.
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I'm gonna guess single card with PhysX will be fine most of the time, but when you get into some big rushes of baddies and there's lots of effects going off, it's going to drag framerates down quite a bit.
 
I used the instruction that where in the forum recently and they worked great... In Borderlands I'm using a 7850 and GT640... At 1080p with all options on highest settings I've yet to see any slowdown at all... Everything seem very fluid infact... I've played to Lvl 11 where I just met "Ellie" in the junkyard...
I've yet to see where the GT640 is a poor card to use for dedicated Physx...
 
flip504 said:
Question. How do you know if Physx is working when playing BL2?

Thanks
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You will see something like what is in this video. Plus there are settings inside the game's option menu that show what the level of your Physx is currently at.
 
Pandakun72 said:
I used the instruction that where in the forum recently and they worked great... In Borderlands I'm using a 7850 and GT640... At 1080p with all options on highest settings I've yet to see any slowdown at all... Everything seem very fluid infact... I've played to Lvl 11 where I just met "Ellie" in the junkyard...
I've yet to see where the GT640 is a poor card to use for dedicated Physx...
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heh yeah. Im playing on surround and i dont see how the 640 sucks for physx either.
 
Viper87227 said:
I don't think this game is really going to need a dedicated card. Considering a 660 can handle high physx in its own... anything you've got going in SLI should be powerful enough to not require a 3rd card.
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Not sure about that. I only got to fire it up once this morning but the PhysX option was grayed out for me. I'm using a GTX670. All the other visuals are maxed out. Contemplating sticking my old GTX260 back in there for PhysX support but don't want another power sink in there just for this. I can live without it but I'd really like to see it working.:cool:
 
Wolf-R1 said:
Not sure about that. I only got to fire it up once this morning but the PhysX option was grayed out for me. I'm using a GTX670. All the other visuals are maxed out. Contemplating sticking my old GTX260 back in there for PhysX support but don't want another power sink in there just for this. I can live without it but I'd really like to see it working.:cool:
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I'm using max physx with my 670 no problem, just the one card.
 
I havent played much but am using one of the hybrid PhysX mods. Seems to be working fine with with 6970 for the main card and GTS 450 for the PhysX.
 
Anyone know if you would get playable framerates with a single 680gtx at 2560x1600 with PhysX and other settings on high?

If need be, I'd trade off SSAO and anti-aliasing for a performance boost.

[H] needs to do a performance IQ review of BL2 asap :)
 
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