Does PhysX run better on a 4790K or 780TI

[Michael Rahmani]

I'm curious to know if PhysX runs better on my GPU or CPU. A lot of people say if your CPU is more powerful than your GPU, then you should set it to the CPU. Meanwhile, other people say PhysX is designed for a GPU architecture, and if you set it to the CPU it will put a lot of unneeded strain on it. Does it even matter what you set it to?

 

Thanks in advance!

[harrynowl]

GPUs are much more powerful than CPUs.

 

PhysX is designed/intended to be run on the GPU.

[Demonking]

Hell no Ninja that shit works best on the GPU.

[Morpheus]

in theory gpu but the games that use physx optimize it so horribly i haven't noticed a big difference between cpu or gpu lol

[Enderman]

Physx is highly parallelized code which takes advantage of the thousands of cores inside a GPU

[Daveeede]

The option to set it to the cpu is mainly for amd users i believe. But in most cases, as long as your cpu is not already bottlenecking the gpu, there shouldn't be much of a difference. 

 

I take borderlands 2 as an example. I used to hover around 60 fps at 1440p ulta on my gtx 770. After switching to my r9 290 and setting the cpu to handle physx, I am getting close to 90 fps at 1440p ultra. And quality-wise I can't tell the difference.

[Nexxus]

The issue is when you are have 1 card those "toggleable physx settings" are going to put a massive strain on the 1 card since the card is pumping out the gfx and doing the phyx processing.

In games without a togglable setting (project cars) the cpu handles phyx no matter if you are on nvidia or AMD gpus

If you have 2 cards leaving it on auto is best but you would be better of setting it to gpu generally speaking.

[Michael Rahmani]

OK, thanks everyone! I set it to GPU through the NVIDIA control panel instead of ingame settings so its global. 

[Quinnbeast]

GPUs are much more powerful than CPUs.

 

PhysX is designed/intended to be run on the GPU.

 

Trying to compare completely different architecture in terms of 'power' is largely meaningless. CPUs can handle far more complex computations that GPUs can't possibly process, whereas GPUs can deal with simple tasks in parallel more efficiently than the relatively limited CPU cores can cope with.

 

Physics functions are fairly simple, and are increasingly associated with the GPU, due to the architecture being better suited.