Gtx 750 as a dedicated physx card

[byronlukeallen]

Hello all. I am thinking about putting a gtx 750 in my pc as a dedicated physx card to minimise load on my 970's as much as possible. However my mobo only has a pcie 2.0 x16 slot available that will run in x2 mode. Just 2 questions

Will the card even work in a PCI slot running that slow?

And if it would work:

As the 750 doesn't support dx12, will this mean when running dx12 games in the future I won't even be able to utilise the card?

Btw I am running:

Mobo: asus z97ar

Cpu: i5 4670k

Ram: 16gb corsair dominator 1600mhz

Gpu: 2x gtx 970 in SLI

PSU: corsair 860 of some variety (80 plus platinum)

 

[Forgotten031511]

Using the GTX 750 for dedicated PhysX on a PCI-e 2.0 lane is no problem. PCI-e 3.0 cards are backwards compatible with PCI-e 2.0. In regards to the DX12, if the GTX 750 is just for PhysX you should not have an issue to the best of my knowledge as the GTX 750 is just dealing with PhysX engines.

Quick question: what are you doing that GTX 970's in SLI need help with? SLI 970's perform better than the GTX 980 Ti and AMD Fury cards...are you gaming in 4K maxed out or something?

 

[byronlukeallen]

Hello. It is just to minimise the Load on the 970's as much as possible, currently running 1440p with everything on ultra. Although it runs fantastic at the moment if I can add an £80 card that will help future proof or boost the fps even a tiny bit it seems worth the money.

Are you sure that it won't bottleneck in a x2 mode slot though?

 

[Forgotten031511]

Very sure, using a GTX 750 in PCI-e as a single card for PhysX will not bottleneck at all. Please refer to the quoted article below.

"Single card Gaming versus generational different PCIe slots

As the article has shown, if you use a single high-end graphics card then really, even the PCIe Gen 1.1 slot would be sufficient. Gen 2.0 is preferred and Gen 3.0 only brings in a marginal improvement. Pretty much everybody anno 2015 is on PCIe Gen 2.0 though, so if you are worried that performance is cut in half due to that faster PCIe Gen 3.0 slot, then think again in a modest 2 to 3% percent on average."

Source: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/pci_express_scaling_game_performance_analysis_review,17.html

 

[17seconds]

Using Maxwell’s GTX 750 Ti as a dedicated PhysX card
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/using-maxwells-gtx-750-ti-dedicated-physx-card/

 

[Arran Juty]

Yes it will work
Source: experience