- Oct 27, 2012
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Ok, I know that the question about running Phys-X on an AMD/ATI GPU has been beaten more than a dead horse, but the question I have is not that, exactly. I just had an odd experience, and I'd like some insight, if any.
My first ‘gaming’ (and I use that word lightly) rig was an old Dual Core 1.7Ghz Celeron, 4Gbs of 800Mhz DDR2 RAM, a 5400rpm WD Blue 500GB Hard Drive, and an AMD Radeon HD 5770 GPU. Kinda sorta sucked at most everything besides gaming, which the GPU handled most of. I bought Alice: Madness Returns without knowing about the lack of support/ compatibility for Phys-X on AMD GPUs. Even so, the game worked near perfectly, and I played it twice through on this rig.
About a year later, my motherboard died, so I decided it was time for an upgrade: AMD Phenom II x4 965 at 3.4Ghz , 7200rpm 250GB Hard Drive for my OS, 1.5TB 5400rpm Hard Drive for data, 8 GB 1600mhz DDR3 RAM, and I kept using the AMD Radeon HD 5770. This rig was so much faster in every way EXCEPT Alice. When I tried playing the game on it, it would stutter and lag and be near impossible to play. Even when changing the .ini Phys-X files, it was pretty pathetic. After hours of searching the web, I still never got a solid answer on the reason why it worked on the Celeron but not the Phenom.
Through a new turn of events a couple of weeks ago, I came to be the proud owner of: a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD, an Intel i7-2600K and matching motherboard, and 8 more GB of RAM for FREE! So now I have the i7 running my system. The SSD is my main OS drive, and I have 16 GB of RAM. My old 7200 RPM HDD is now my game drive. I'm still using the Radeon HD 5770, which I know is now bottlenecking my system (not the point of this thread, though).
NOW, Alice works flawlessly, even without an Nvidia GPU. Obviously, the i7 is faster than the Phenom and has ‘8’ cores (HT) vs only 4. I know the extra RAM helps a bit, as does the SSD (even though the game is not running on this drive). I would expect pretty much everything to work better on this newest incarnation of my rig.
I’m still confused, though, as to why Alice worked better on my Celeron than on my Phenom. My ONLY idea is that the Celeron had built in graphics, however crappy, that allowed it to take the Phys-X load from my GPU. I know that Phys-X is designed to shunt completely to the CPU when it detects an AMD GPU in the system. Could the Intel HD onboard graphics on both the Celeron and my i7 be what’s causing Alice to work better?
*Note* If the moderators feel this thread is more suited for a different forum, feel free to move it, and I apologize in advance.
My first ‘gaming’ (and I use that word lightly) rig was an old Dual Core 1.7Ghz Celeron, 4Gbs of 800Mhz DDR2 RAM, a 5400rpm WD Blue 500GB Hard Drive, and an AMD Radeon HD 5770 GPU. Kinda sorta sucked at most everything besides gaming, which the GPU handled most of. I bought Alice: Madness Returns without knowing about the lack of support/ compatibility for Phys-X on AMD GPUs. Even so, the game worked near perfectly, and I played it twice through on this rig.
About a year later, my motherboard died, so I decided it was time for an upgrade: AMD Phenom II x4 965 at 3.4Ghz , 7200rpm 250GB Hard Drive for my OS, 1.5TB 5400rpm Hard Drive for data, 8 GB 1600mhz DDR3 RAM, and I kept using the AMD Radeon HD 5770. This rig was so much faster in every way EXCEPT Alice. When I tried playing the game on it, it would stutter and lag and be near impossible to play. Even when changing the .ini Phys-X files, it was pretty pathetic. After hours of searching the web, I still never got a solid answer on the reason why it worked on the Celeron but not the Phenom.
Through a new turn of events a couple of weeks ago, I came to be the proud owner of: a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD, an Intel i7-2600K and matching motherboard, and 8 more GB of RAM for FREE! So now I have the i7 running my system. The SSD is my main OS drive, and I have 16 GB of RAM. My old 7200 RPM HDD is now my game drive. I'm still using the Radeon HD 5770, which I know is now bottlenecking my system (not the point of this thread, though).
NOW, Alice works flawlessly, even without an Nvidia GPU. Obviously, the i7 is faster than the Phenom and has ‘8’ cores (HT) vs only 4. I know the extra RAM helps a bit, as does the SSD (even though the game is not running on this drive). I would expect pretty much everything to work better on this newest incarnation of my rig.
I’m still confused, though, as to why Alice worked better on my Celeron than on my Phenom. My ONLY idea is that the Celeron had built in graphics, however crappy, that allowed it to take the Phys-X load from my GPU. I know that Phys-X is designed to shunt completely to the CPU when it detects an AMD GPU in the system. Could the Intel HD onboard graphics on both the Celeron and my i7 be what’s causing Alice to work better?
*Note* If the moderators feel this thread is more suited for a different forum, feel free to move it, and I apologize in advance.
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