Cryostasis PC Game TechDemo - Physics Benchmarking

[Apoptosis]

no it won't work and if you look at the post above your reply it explains how it is a driver limitation right now.

[DX]

oooooo some how though I don't think that I'm going to get a 3k income tax refund though....

[MasonStorm@LegitRevi]

Hello Apoptosis,

Would it be possible for Legit Reviews to acquire one of those newer motherboards capable of supporting 4 GPUs? I'm referring to the ASRock X58 SuperComputer, the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution, the EVGA Classified, or - for the older chipset - the Asus P5N64 WS Pro.

The purpose of my asking is to see a comparison of the results of this article against a system with triple-SLI plus a fourth GPU used just for PhysX, such as your triple-SLI GTX 280s PLUS that 9600GT.

(And of course, we'll all be curious to see how a really fancy GPU fares as that fourth card used only for PhysX --- like using a 9800GX2 or GTX295 just for that, and how that compares to using a weaker GPU (like the 9600GT) only for PhysX, when paired with such a fancy system for rendering.)

[InspectahACE]

If i remember correctly, you cannot run 3 280's and then a 9600 for physx..mainly that #1 there would be no room on most motherboards..looked at other boards you mention but 3 280's would cover ALL slots then on them except the ASRock baord but the next reason will shed more light..#2 Video cards do not have the amount of SLI bridge connectors to daisy chain 4 separate cards, they normally only come with 2..so at least that would leave you room for a pci-e sound card or whatever on that ASROCK (which would've been ideal for me darn it) you could do 2 gtx280's and a 9600 though(as seen in the benchmark)..the 295's only have one connector therefore you can only do SLI with them which also takes the possibility of another physx card out too..with gtx295 "Quad"SLI you wouldn't need a physx card anyhow..also, you would either have to have the rig outside of a case or somethin as even most full towers have a fun time even fitting 3 physical cards with how they place the mother board mounts(depending on brand and if it's more monstrous than full tower)..I remember asking about tri-sli and a physx card a bit of time ago and the #2 reason i put was the one givin to me..the other reasons I found out the hard way

[MasonStorm@LegitRevi]

In the interim I've acquired an ASRock X58 SuperComputer, and I do have 4 GPUs in it...from your post, I'll need to explain. All of my GPUs would be dual-slot monsters, except that I turned them into single-slot, liquid-cooled versions (that's an easy mod to do). So only four slots are being used by GPUs in my rig...indeed, I also have a Creative X-Fi in the first PCI slot.

I was never suggesting daisychaining four GPUs. I have my first three in a triple-SLI setup; three GTX 280s connected via the triple-SLI connector. The fourth GPU, an 8800GTX, isn't connected in any way, shape or form via SLI connectors...it's simply plugged into the MoBo. I want to see if it adds something to FPS in games by acting as a separate PhysX card (and I lack the time to benchmark it myself - I'm just trying it and hoping it turns out to have been worth the effort). Be sure to note that the article this forum is posting about is doing exactly that - just that they weren't able to try it yet using 4 GPUs because their selected MoBo didn't have the requisite number of slots. They tried it w/3 GPUs --- the two identical ones in SLI, connected via SLI, and the third --- the 9600GT --- connected only to the MoBo.

In any event, I will first have to deal with the inevitable problems that show up when building such a complex rig. Right now, one of the little liquid-cooling bridge connectors between GPUs 2 and 3 has a slight leak, and I'm not getting any display at all on my monitor. I'll post back here if I get any results worth talking about.

Finally, one doesn't HAVE to do this using liquid cooling...if you use a SuperTower case, such as the ThermalTake Armor Plus (just for example), you can have that 4th GPU hanging down past the lower edge of the MoBo. But I wanted to try for more quietude than that would have allowed.

[MasonStorm@LegitRevi]

I can now post useful results, which are a pleasant surprise!

My AsRock died on me during attempts at overclocking; please see Tom's Hardware for their similar experiences with overclocking the AsRock X58 SuperComputer. Mine died in exactly the same fashion. AsRock apparently are working on board revisions and BIOS updates to address the problem, but for right now, the replacement MoBo in my hands is still one of the older revision. I've been reading good things about the new EVGA X58 Classified, so I bought one of those and used it for this benchmark.

I'm using a Core i7-920 (C0 stepping), overclocked to 4GHz on the Classified and stable in stress testing. There are 6GB of Corsair memory at 1600-8-8-8-24-1T. The top PCI-E slot has a Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Champion Series sound card. On the remaining PCI-E slots I have three GTX-280s in tri-SLI, and an 8800GTX dedicated for PhysX. All of this is liquid-cooled, so the GPUs were cut down to single-slots. I'm using a Dell 30" monitor, so the resolution is 2560x1600.

One nicety of this new Classified is its ability to disable individual PCI-E slots just by moving a jumper, so it was very easy to compare the setup with and without the 8800GTX, without having to remove it from the MoBo physically, or interrupt the liquid cooling loop.

WITHOUT the 8800GTX - just using the tri-SLI GTX-280s, doing the PhysX themselves, the Min/Avg/Max framerates (with all the benchmark settings at their highest, most demanding, and @ 2560x1600) are: 29.5/47.9/149.5. WITH the 8800GTX doing the PhysX, the results are 32.2/71/159.6.

That's a 48% improvement in avg framerates, WITH the separate, dedicated PhysX card, at this demanding resolution!! I'm sure we'll be reading more about this new setup in reviews to come. Cheers all!

[Apoptosis]

Do you have a link for the AsRock X58 SuperComputer failure? I wasn't aware the board had issues like death

[MasonStorm@LegitRevi]

Sure...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/asr ... ,2275.html

In this article, they also point to their original motherboard roundup, in which they noted two of these boards died on them...one death of which took the i7-920 with it!

[UK_John]

I found this site looking for game information, rather than hardware info. I am just an ordinary PC gamer that's seeing fewer and fewer PC releases and few and fewer quality games. More and more I am finding games like this that I have never heard of before getting reviewed out of the blue as though PC gaming sites really have to look hard to find stuff. I just had to register to point this out!

Then I come on this site and see people seriously talking about SLI'ing two $400 cards and another $50 card for PhysX!

I mean, seriously, what signs are there in our PC gaming hobby that spending that kind of money is now value for money? Gamespot, for the whole of 2008, reviewed only 52 games, and the average review score was a meagre 69.5%. For comparison, I chose a random year in the 90's (1994) and copied and pasted the hits from just that one year: There were 25 of them. So 1994 25 classic game releases. 2008 52 Gamespot reviews and a 69.5% average. As a 20 year gamer I can see that PC gaming no longer needs this sort of money spend. The few PC titles that are released are now mostly console conversions, so tend to be much more simplistic on the graphic front. Publishers are also looking at the huge and growing casual and retro markets (with EA re-making 1997's Syndicate, for example) and not producing these high end graphic games for PC any more.

Feel free to spend your money any way you want, of course. But I find it interesting there is no talk of what PC games in the future are going to need/utilize these set-ups! From the trends, it's easy to see just indie titles and AAA MMO's being produced for PC in a couple years! Neither of these push any graphical limits!

Oh and that list of 1994 hits? In no particular order:

Doom
TIE Fighter
System Shock
1942: The Pacific Air War
Star Trail: Realms of Arkania
X-COM: UFO Defense
Panzer General
NASCAR Racing
Lords of the Realm
Goblins Quest 3
The Way Things Work
X-Wing Collector's CD-ROM
Under a Killing Moon
Creature Shock
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Beneath a Steel Sky
FIFA International Soccer
Aces Of The Deep
Colonization
Descent
Alone In The Dark 2
Desert Strike - Return to The Gulf
Jagged Alliance
Jazz Jackrabbit
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Malcolms Revenge