Physics Accelerators

[Gerrine44]

Ive been reading about them and im going to be purchasing a new computerin a few weeks, and im curious about them and how they might effect EQ 2 performance. Does anyone have any experience with these? I havent been able to find much about them wen it comes to everquest.

[Kaliguwra]

They really wouldn't give any increase in performance more so, because Physics Cards are used with programs that have those abilities to use the card. It's basically a smaller video card that is slaved to your other video card. Stick with getting a 8800GTX, 9800GTX, or ATI 3850 x2... 2 or 4 gigs of paired DDR2800/1066 memory, and a processor that runs up to about 3.0 GHZ.

[Dark_Grue]

<cite>Gerrine44 wrote:</cite><blockquote>Ive been reading about them and im going to be purchasing a new computerin a few weeks, and im curious about them and how they might effect EQ 2 performance. Does anyone have any experience with these? I havent been able to find much about them wen it comes to everquest.</blockquote><p>There's no "physics" in EQ, and no support for the PhysX API, so there's exactly zero benefit from a physics card.</p><p>As Kaliguwra mentions, the game must be specifically coded to use the physics accelerator, or there's no benefit. Only games that use the PhysX SDK can benefit from the presence of a PhysX card. Games using the PhysX SDK can be accelerated by either a PhysX PPU or a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CUDA</a> (Compute Unified Device Architecture) enabled GeForce GPU.</p><p>I'm not entirely certain, but I believe that using a NVIDIA card for physics acceleration dedicates the card for that purpose, meaning tha you need at least 2 cards in the machine in order to play a game in that configuration (basically, instead of buying AEGIA's overpriced card, you've buying another video card to use it as a physics accelerator OR for SLI, but not both).</p><p>Given that multi-core CPUs are now common, the idea of accelerating physics by offloading calclulation onto specialized hardware may be moot. Offloading a bunch of calculations onto a video card's hardware (which includes a lot of hardware and firmware tha are great for video, but totally useless for physics calculations) is likely only economical if you already have that extra card and weren't using it for SLI. Since any games that would benefit from it would have to be coded for it, it's not likely the situation would be "I can't use my 2nd video card for SLI, since the game doesn't support or work well with it, so I'll just shift it over to physics acceleration and still benefit from owning two video cards." If you had three cards, you could do SLI and physics. Four, 3-way SLI and physics. The economics of it are questionable.</p>