Worth buying Nvidia for PhysX?

[zakobi]

Was just wondering if it's worth buying Nvidia over ATI regarding PhysX.

[EtherealN]

In my own opinion, no. I haven't seen PhysX get used all that much, but just like multithreading it is becoming more common. But at this time - no.

[Feuerfalke]

No. For several reasons.

 

1. PhysX is mostly used for optical effects. Not only because it's layed out for this kind of calculations, but also because you can't make e.g. a simulation based on a piece of hardware only a fraction of endusers has access to.

 

2. PhysX has been overtaken by multicore-processors and gfx-chips. When PhysX was released the advantage was pretty obvious: Force it on and you had a tremendous drop in FPS. With modern graphics cards, no matter if it's ATI or nVidia, as well as modern multicore CPUs in cooperation with Win7/Vista, there performance drop is very minimal.

 

3. Reading 2. you probably wondered, "hey, how can I enable PhysX with ATI?". There are two ways: Older games usually had a variable in some setup-file (Like GhostReconMWF), which you could simply edit manually, for newer games, nVidia supported ATI (!) in creating a patch that allows to use PhysX on ATI. It's not an "official" patch, though.

 

nVidia helps ATI? No not really. They just see that it's not worth it and use the knowledge and theory of PhysX for things like CUDA and newer technologies to use the raw computing power of modern GFX-chips to assist the CPU.

 

Long story short: As EtherealN already posted, multicore-processors, modern OS and technologies to make the GFX-chips aid the CPU will be much more important and flexible for future releases. (BTW, I'd personally go for an ATI if I had to buy a new graphics card now.)