NVidia GTX 650Ti Three Way Roundup
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, October 09, 2012
GTX 650 TI as Dedicated PhysX
One great feature of NVidia PhysX is the ability to dedicate a spare GPU for PhysX calculations. We mentioned early in this review that while GTX 650 Ti won't be the first pick for an enthusiast system build it can serve a purpose in making your PhysX games much better.
Enter dedicated PhysX
For this test we changed things up a bit and configured our test rig with 2x GTX 580 GPUs in SLI and dedicated the Gigabyte GTX 650 Ti to do all of our PhysX calculations. To see how this configuration would help and/or hinder our gaming performance we re-ran the Borderlands 2 PhysX benchmark and tested the following
CPU Dedicated PhysX
SLI Confguration with the secondary card running PhysX cacuations
SLI Configuration with a Gigabyte GTX 650 Ti dedicated to PhysX
The maximum 2560 x 1600 screen resolution was used throughout this test
Enter dedicated PhysX
For this test we changed things up a bit and configured our test rig with 2x GTX 580 GPUs in SLI and dedicated the Gigabyte GTX 650 Ti to do all of our PhysX calculations. To see how this configuration would help and/or hinder our gaming performance we re-ran the Borderlands 2 PhysX benchmark and tested the following
CPU Dedicated PhysX
SLI Confguration with the secondary card running PhysX cacuations
SLI Configuration with a Gigabyte GTX 650 Ti dedicated to PhysX
The maximum 2560 x 1600 screen resolution was used throughout this test
PhysX Conclusion
As you can see from the chart dedicating a single GPU to PhysX processing can really help overall gaming performance. Of course this can only benefit you in games supporting PhysX like Borderlands 2 but a 30fps average gain for $150US seems like a good investment to complement your high end gaming system.
Of course similar performance can be seen using older cards and to test this we replaced the GTX 650 Ti with a Gigabyte GTX 560 and re-ran the benchmarks. The results are not all that surprising and mirrored the GTX 650 Ti tests with only one major difference, less power consumed. Yes, as you know Fermi based GPUs are quite power hungry and in our PhysX tests there was a 50w drop in power consumption by simply switching to a newer Kepler based GPU.
Of course similar performance can be seen using older cards and to test this we replaced the GTX 650 Ti with a Gigabyte GTX 560 and re-ran the benchmarks. The results are not all that surprising and mirrored the GTX 650 Ti tests with only one major difference, less power consumed. Yes, as you know Fermi based GPUs are quite power hungry and in our PhysX tests there was a 50w drop in power consumption by simply switching to a newer Kepler based GPU.
