Nvidia GTX 460 Discussion

[Piyush]

what wil be the power requirtements for the sli setup of gtx 460 and Xfire setup of 5850?

[rajan1311]

a decent 650W PSU should handle it..

[funkysourav]

@mukherjee
what idle and load(while gaming)temps are you getting on the card?

[asingh]

what wil be the power requirtements for the sli setup of gtx 460 and Xfire setup of 5850?

Any >=650W well branded PSU which has four PEG connectors...!

[mukherjee]

@mukherjee
what idle and load(while gaming)temps are you getting on the card?

idle,as i said before,hovers around the 38-39degrees.

In game,the max i noted after 1hr of Metro 2033 was 67 degrees.

Is that ok?

[tkin]

idle,as i said before,hovers around the 38-39degrees.

In game,the max i noted after 1hr of Metro 2033 was 67 degrees.

Is that ok?

Its ok but try running warhead maxed out and report load temps, load a map and play for an hour, report temps, that's the max temps you'll get on your gpu(apart from furmark or such but try to stay away from those, members in guru3d just said to me that with such high ambient here I should not run power viruses specially kombustor with unlock power draw on, it can kill your card)
.

[funkysourav]

just offtopic and curious,
can the GTX460 play metro 2033 in high settings at 1600x900 and physx medium?
does the physx churn too much out of the card?

---------- Post added at 10:40 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:37 PM ----------

does physx add some serious eyecandy to the gameplay?

[tkin]

just offtopic and curious,
can the GTX460 play metro 2033 in high settings at 1600x900 and physx medium?
does the physx churn too much out of the card?

Theres no physx low-medium-high, its either on or off and turning it on kills the GTX460, it can play high but physx off, actually you can play it on very high but physx off, otherwise your framerate will take a bad hit(<30).

Not much eye candy, a few spider webs and flags in a specific level swings in air.

[funkysourav]

hmm
physx is a badass resource sucker you say?
metro must be a terribly coded game!!
what about physx in games like mass effect2?

p.s.
we are royally screwed if crytek decides to go physx in crysis 2!!

[tkin]

hmm
physx is a badass resource sucker you say?
metro must be a terribly coded game!!
what about physx in games like mass effect2?

p.s.
we are royally screwed if crytek decides to go physx in crysis 2!!

Mass Effect 2 does not use physx and yes metro is very unoptimized, most used physics engine is now havoc and it runs on cpu only and its owned by intel, so it comes down to the processor.

[asingh]

Metro is also a killer since it has tessellation. Both nVidia and ATI cards have weak tessellator integration on the die. Since it is first release for them. I am able to run Metro just fine, get around 55+ fps, but of course tessellation is not there.

[tkin]

Metro is also a killer since it has tessellation. Both nVidia and ATI cards have weak tessellator integration on the die. Since it is first release for them. I am able to run Metro just fine, get around 55+ fps, but of course tessellation is not there.

Actually enabling DX11(tessallation) butchers midrange cards like HD5850/GTX460 etc.

[funkysourav]

Mass Effect 2 does not use physx

no, mass effect 2 does use physx
check it on the net! (wikipedia)

most used physics engine is now havoc and it runs on cpu only and its owned by intel

does havok run on AMD processors,
or is it bound with Intel processors only, like the case of PHYSX?

Both nVidia and ATI cards have weak tessellator integration on the die. Since it is first release for them.

i heard that GTX 460 has better tessellation capability than HD5850!!
isn't the tesselator in GTX460 strong enough to run metro?

[rajan1311]

^Its 30fps at very high, DX11 at 1280x1024. Thats good enough, but only for people like me with a 19" screen

But the bright side is, its better than a 5850 when tessellation is used.

[asingh]

no, mass effect 2 does use physx
check it on the net! (wikipedia)

Correct, yes it uses nVidia PhysX proprietary. The pack would need to be installed, else the game will not launch.

does havok run on AMD processors,
or is it bound with Intel processors only, like the case of PHYSX?

Havok can run on any CPU. Red Falcon Guerilla and TimeShift used it beautifully.

i heard that GTX 460 has better tessellation capability than HD5850!!
isn't the tesselator in GTX460 strong enough to run metro?

[/QUOTE]
Not sure which has the better tessellators, but the HD5850 and HD5870 were beaten by the tessellation of GTX470 and GTX480 respectively. As of now, no GPU is really doing a good job. The polygons get broken down far too much.

[funkysourav]

Correct, yes it uses nVidia PhysX proprietary. The pack would need to be installed, else the game will not launch.

does that mean it wont run without physx??
if it runs on ati 5xxx cards,
what's the damage in terms of eyecandy?
i.e if physx can be disabled

[Piyush]

does that mean it wont run without physx??
if it runs on ati 5xxx cards,
what's the damage in terms of eyecandy?
i.e if physx can be disabled

some games setups comes with the physx drivers along with them like borderlands and singularity

it doesnt matter which card u have
u must have those drivers installed on ur system

i tried it once
i uninstalled those drivers and then tried to ru that games
both showed same error(i dont remember the exact words)

[asingh]

does that mean it wont run without physx??
if it runs on ati 5xxx cards,
what's the damage in terms of eyecandy?
i.e if physx can be disabled

See, basically PhysX (nVidia) is NOT a driver. It is a middle ware engine + SDK which can be used to accelerate on the GPU. Now since these API calls are embedded within the game code (much easier then writing own code to handle Physics) the came "checks" for the necessary engine components (software) before launching, be it ATI GPU or nVidia GPU. Now if there is an nVidia card installed PhysX will render, else it does not. Without PhysX, many say it is fine, others say it is cr$$. Totally depends on personal point-of-view.

What Piyush, said makes total sense. If the pack is not installed game will not launch. I remember trying to play Scorpion Disfigured without the PhysX pack, it never launched. Most games which are nVidia PhysX compatible install the pack as part of the standard installer.

[funkysourav]

no what i mean to say is that
games whichhave Physx middleware in them,
can they run in Ati cards with Physx turned off?
i heard that BATMAN AA severely cripples Ati HD5770 cards in physx and non physx both!!

[asingh]

^^
If ATI GPU, PhysX will not render. The game (which ever) is getting crippled due to some other reason.

[tkin]

no, mass effect 2 does use physx
check it on the net! (wikipedia)


does havok run on AMD processors,
or is it bound with Intel processors only, like the case of PHYSX?


i heard that GTX 460 has better tessellation capability than HD5850!!
isn't the tesselator in GTX460 strong enough to run metro?

Well, mass effect physx run on cpu not on gpu and hence does not limit ati users, also the game has limited physics, bfbc2 has some nice physics.

Havok run on all cpus but intel might have tried to optimize it more for intel cpus(look in the intel compiler bias fiasco a few months back).

GTX460 like all other fermis lack a fixed tessallator in their card, they use the shaders to compute the tessallation data, whereas AMD has a fixed tessallator in their cards, so fermi does better because the shaders are more powerful than any tessallator chip can ever be, its a very good innovation on nVidias part but also note that turning on tessallation affects the fermi framerate more than HD5xxx series framerate as AMD has a dedicated tessallator.

PS: Tessallation has yet to show any big improvements in games because most game engines like unreal engine do not use tessallation by default and hence it is added like a add-on in game and runs like crap, until the engine is build from ground up to use tessallation it won't happen, and that's not until the next consoles come out @ 2012 earliest.

[asingh]

^^
Tessellation is not driven via an engine. It is part of the Dx11 API. Developers can make the API call in the game code, and it will get harnessed to the GPU hardware for processing and rendering.

[Piyush]

@funkysaurav
u must be talkin about these results

http://media.bestofmicro.com/3/D/226...hysX%20Off.png

http://media.bestofmicro.com/3/E/226...PhysX%20On.png

[tkin]

^^
Tessellation is not driven via an engine. It is part of the Dx11 API. Developers can make the API call in the game code, and it will get harnessed to the GPU hardware for processing and rendering.

But there's a built in tessellator for amd cards(had it since HD2900 series)

Wikipedia(R600, ie HD29xx):

Hardware tessellation
The GPU is equipped with an extra feature which is not part of the current DirectX 10.0 specification. It contains programmable tessellation units, similar to those within the Xenos GPU (codenamed C1) also developed by ATI. This unit allows a developer to take a simple polygon mesh and subdivide it based on a curved surface evaluation function, with different tessellation forms as Bézier surfaces with N-patches, B-splines and NURBS, and even some subdivision surface techniques, which usually comes with a displacement map texture.[4] Essentially, this allows a simple, low-polygon model to be increased dramatically in polygon density in real-time with minimized performance loss. Scott Wasson of Tech Report noted during an AMD demo of the technology that the resulting model was so dense with millions of polygons that it appeared to be solid.

This unit is reminiscent of ATI's earlier TruForm technology, used initially in the Radeon 8500, which performed a similar function in hardware. While this tessellation hardware is not part of the current OpenGL or Direct3D requirements, and competitors such as the GeForce 8 series lack similar hardware, Microsoft has included Tessellation as part of their D3D10.1 future plans.

The TruForm technology from the past received little attention from software developers and was only utilized in a few game titles (such as Madden NFL 2004, Serious Sam, Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, and unofficially Morrowind), because it was not a feature shared with NVIDIA GPUs which had a competing tessellation solution using Quintic-RT patches which met with even less support from developers. Since the Xenos contains similar hardware, and Microsoft sees hardware surface tessellation as a major GPU feature with proposed implementation of hardware tessellation support in future DirectX releases (presumably DirectX 11), dedicated hardware tessellation units may receive increased developer awareness in future titles. It remains to be seen whether ATI's implementation will be compatible with the eventual DirectX standard

The tessellator was modified and put in HD4xxx(useless) and HD5xxx(used) series, while nVidia uses their shaders to compute the polygons. Its basically same, think of is as AMD has a bunch of shaders separated in HD5xxx series to do tessellation while nVidia uses their CUDA cores(shaders in the GPU) dynamically to compute tessellation data, so while on a pure tessellation performance basis HD5870 is not any more faster than HD5450 as both have same tessellator in them(clock speeds may vary) but in nVidia's case GTX480 is significantly faster in tessellation than GTX460 due to the extra shaders present in it.

More jargon here: Nvidia's form of Tessellation compared to AMD/ATI's form of Tessellation

[asingh]

^^
Yes, I know that Tkin. What I meant was that there is no such engine within the game which enables Tessellation. I was referring to the software part of the rendering mechanism. The hardware details you mentioned make sense, nice link by the way..!

By the way, bot of us have discussed this before. So for the group, I will posts the links. Both our posts are back to back. The team will enjoy reading them...!

Tkin's writeup on Tessellation.
Asingh's writup on Tesselation.

And the original thread page is here, if you want to see the context of the conversation.

[mukherjee]

new gpuz v0.4.5 screenie

[mukherjee]

Here are the updated temps after I set up the new CM 430 cabby.

1. Gpu after 15mins idling





2. After a run of Kombustor




3. Stressing the CPU



Uploaded with ImageShack.us


Comments please

[asingh]

^^
Its cooling well. Expect 10C less using games..!

[funkysourav]

very cool temps!!
you have nothing to worry!
but i wouldn't stress test the card so often,
maybe once in 2 months or so,
at max

[mukherjee]

^^
Its cooling well. Expect 10C less using games..!

Thanks! Hmmm...that wud be good.

very cool temps!!
you have nothing to worry!
but i wouldn't stress test the card so often,
maybe once in 2 months or so,
at max

U are absolutely right. i jus went thru a vrm article yesterdayhere

No further stress for me,neither my gpu!