Cryostasis PC Game TechDemo - Physics Benchmarking

[jnanster]

What horrible SLI and Triple results on the 280, like why bother.
Is this a driver problem or is it the introduction of PhysX or what?

[Apoptosis]

What horrible SLI and Triple results on the 280, like why bother.
Is this a driver problem or is it the introduction of PhysX or what?

don't think it would be a driver problem since NVIDIA is hosting the download for the techdemo they helped develop! Welcome PhysX!

That and I showed NVIDIA these performance numbers before I posted the article yesterday and they didn't say anything looked wrong.

[gwolfman]

very nice update. Thanks!

[DX]

No what I was asking is that in there isn't a spot in the benchmarks that shows two 280's in SLI with a third 280 running physics vs the 9600gt running physics.

[shaolin95]

Please use a 8800GT or equivalent card for GPU...it has been demonstrated to offer a big improvement over a 9600 series.
Regards

[jnanster]

What horrible SLI and Triple results on the 280, like why bother.
Is this a driver problem or is it the introduction of PhysX or what?

don't think it would be a driver problem since NVIDIA is hosting the download for the techdemo they helped develop! Welcome PhysX!

That and I showed NVIDIA these performance numbers before I posted the article yesterday and they didn't say anything looked wrong.

Ooh! Reality! Stings, Crysis what Crysis. Guess it shows the kind of real world computing power this much "reality" requires.

[Apoptosis]

No what I was asking is that in there isn't a spot in the benchmarks that shows two 280's in SLI with a third 280 running physics vs the 9600gt running physics.

Let me see if I can clear this up for you as that is not possible with today's drivers... If you have more than one card installed and do not have SLI enabled this is what you see in the NVIDIA Control Panel:



you get a drop down menu showing each video card installed and if PhysX is enabled and disabled with a radio button... This implementation is complete crap if you ask me as it's confusing and after you hit apply it often doesn't set it correctly. NVIDIA should list the cards installed in a column and then have a radio button showing enabled/disabled so you can see all the cards at once. The whole drop down menu thing makes things a mess when doing two or more cards.

When running SLI or 3-way SLI there is no way to define what gets PhysX or what doesn't... it's either on or off.



Notice when running SLI that no drop down menu is present and you don't have the ability to run 2-way or 3-way SLI. Its just not possible with the drivers. If you disabled SLI you don't magically get a drop down menu box either... You just get radio check boxes for enable/disable PhysX (option 1) and then enable or disable 3-way SLI (Option 2).

I'd love to do the testing you want me to look at, but its not possible with the current NVIDIA drivers.

[Toebot]

I could be persuaded to pop for a cheap 9000 series card, just for the added eye candy, but I'm not going to buy a new mainboard. Unless it can be done on any board with multiple pci-e x16 slots, I'll have to treat this as an interesting fact with no practical application.

[vicaphit]

I wonder if having a PCI 8000 series card would be of any benefit. Everyone has free PCI slots!

[Apoptosis]

I wonder if having a PCI 8000 series card would be of any benefit. Everyone has free PCI slots!

Not everyone... no slots in my PC -

[vicaphit]

Well you don't need one!

Ok, what I was saying was: Just about every MoBo has a PCI slot, not all of them have multiple PCIe slots.

[haaaam]

Apoptosis that is insane! I can only fear what your electricity bill is

[DX]

bah that sucks. But you could have a 260 then.... What would show up though if you only had the first two cards bridged and not the third card? Would it show SLI then for the two cards and not the third letting you use that 3rd one as the physics card?

[skywalker9952]

What CPU did you use for the benchmark? Based on your FPS with the Physics turned off it looks like the game is really CPU dependent. (12.2 FPS on 1280x1024 drops to 12.1 FPS on 1600x1200). If the CPU is the bottleneck then will you see great performance increases like that on more GPU intensive games? Is Physics just a way to get around a slow CPU?

[Rigel]

I can't believe you didn't try the obvious... use the 9600 for the graphics, and the 260 for the PhysX! Or, two 260s, with one for graphics and one for PhysX!

[C2G]

water and physics looks great, but rest of game looks pretty un-interesting

[Apoptosis]

I can't believe you didn't try the obvious... use the 9600 for the graphics, and the 260 for the PhysX! Or, two 260s, with one for graphics and one for PhysX!

Rigel,

Welcome to the forums. I added in the score for a 9600 GT for the graphics. The charts in the article already show two GeForce GTX's in SLI and 3-way SLI. I have to move on to other articles, so I can't test every configuration possible, but at least you can see how a 9600 GT does.

[Apoptosis]

What CPU did you use for the benchmark? Based on your FPS with the Physics turned off it looks like the game is really CPU dependent. (12.2 FPS on 1280x1024 drops to 12.1 FPS on 1600x1200). If the CPU is the bottleneck then will you see great performance increases like that on more GPU intensive games? Is Physics just a way to get around a slow CPU?

I'm running the benchmarks on the office PC, which is an Intel QX9650 with the half multiplier enabled, so it's running 3.167GHz. The benchmark is CPU limited, but not too many gamers PC are running much over 3.2GHz with a quad core Core 2 processor I wouldn't think. Sure I could OC it to 4GHz with little effort, but the benchmark numbers wouldn't be too real world as the average joe doesn't do that.

[Apoptosis]

bah that sucks. But you could have a 260 then.... What would show up though if you only had the first two cards bridged and not the third card? Would it show SLI then for the two cards and not the third letting you use that 3rd one as the physics card?

I thought about this and figured that NIVDIA wouldn't be able to do that as that owuld be tricky with the driver builds. Just for fun I popped off the 3-way SLI connector and attached the regular single SLI connector and it booted up just fine in single CrossFire mode.

no_3way_connector.jpg (276.75 KiB) Viewed 7584 times

Device Manager shows that all three NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280's installed in the system and that SLI is enabled (notice is doesn't show up as 3-way), but it has just enable/disable PhysX. There is no way to specify PhysX for the 3rd card when running SLI for some reason with identical cards. This is likely a driver bug, so I'll have to report it to NVIDIA tomorrow. I tried, but as you can see no luck. No bid deal though as the game isn't due out for nearly three months and when it comes to drivers that is a lightyear.

[octoberasian]

I'm curious: Since you used SLI-ed 280s and a 9600 GT, would the following work: SLI-ed 280s for graphics plus a third 280 un-SLI-ed (sorry, bad new abbreviation...) for Phys-X?

I wonder how much of an improvement would there be.