Buying a PhysX card?

[OrangeJuicey]

Just been playing unreal 3 and wondered is it worth paying £70 for a physX card or not? I saw a few on the net but none of the shops say what connector is on it either, do i need 2 pci-e slots or is it pci. I doubt many people have them but it'd be good to take the strain off my 7900GS 256mb

[BFG]

http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgrphysx128p.aspx

*Requires compatible game titles. See list of compatible games and system requirements on this
box and at PhysX Detailed Specs Page.

[BertRoot]

UT3 can make use of one of these and installs drivers for it when installing.

I can't see what use if any they are over an expensive graphics card.

[Mickey]

they are nice but they actually lower the FPS down a bit. Have a look at tomshardware as they did a full review of them. They work in a spare PCI slot, if they came down in price id get one and im guessing in the next new card out on the block might have the chip onboard the card.

[criminalben]

I've got the Asus one, sits in a PCI slot. Makes a bit of difference, but I don't think it's really worth the money.

[blacksheep]

Seen a few reviews a short while ago that said not worth it at all compared to shelling out for a better gfx card.

[EvilBoB]

I think the problem with this tech is that not many devs will spend the time optimizing for a piece of hardware that less than 1% of owners have.

I like the idea but with CPUs getting more powerful and GFX cards getting faster and with DX10 starting to hit I have to ask if the Physx cards are worth it. Maybe five years ago...

[{{909}}]

these could be brilliant if they are used correctly, dropping a 70quid card into your machine to take over all the physics based calculations should relieve alot of the tasks off your CPU and GFX card, meaning they can work on other stuff. Doesn't seem to work like that in the real world though.

[OrangeJuicey]

Sounds like its a good idea but not implemented very well then. Its hard to think that it'd lower your fps but i'm sure that it makes the gfx 10x better. Is there any comparisons for gfx with and without this card in? E.g any unreal 3 engine game

[crazyal]

Get a second graphics card and go SLI. These things need specific support in games and to be honest that is going to be few and far between.

[OrangeJuicey]

Fair enough, i think sli is the way to go, the trouble with sli is that I now need to get a new mobo, which means new sata drivers which then means i have to format my disks to use them on the new mobo since i'm using raid 0. Either way i'm only thinking about it at the moment be another month before i buy anything at least.

[blacksheep]

could sell up your old gfx card and use that money + what you were going to spend on a new one - no need for new (probably more expensive) mobo and you probably will end up with better performance.