Physx uses CPU not GPU

[NDDU Julius BSIT]

Played back some of my older favorite games like Mass Effect 3 and I enabled the Physx Indicator on the Nvidia Control Panel and when I launched the game it says CPU not GPU...does Physx only run on Nvidia GPUs? Not on the Intel Integrated GPU?

 

[nzalog]

Hmm i believe that it's set to auto select between CPU or GPU by the driver as default.

You can force it to use one or the other from the nvidia control panel.

Personally I'd let it do whatever it thinks is best (by leaving it set to auto) and just keep your drivers somewhat up to date and you should not really have to worry about it.

 

[NDDU Julius BSIT]

Would it work better if it were to use my GPU as a Physx Device?

 

[dudalemon]

You don't want to dedicate your card to PhysX anyway, just leave it on auto. Otherwise it means you have one GPU processing physics only (for the games that work), you want both to share the load on rendering frames.

 

[nzalog]

Not too sure it really depends game to game. Some games are good at utilizing the CPU and GPU at the same time while others mostly utilize the GPU and barely touch the CPU. So if the CPU is barely used why not run physx on the CPU and let the GPU keep getting utilized. I'm assuming 'auto' can make this distinction and pick the correct setting for the particular game.

Not sure if it's worth the trouble but you could always set it to GPU then benchmark the particular game.

Then try the same thing with CPU and see what gives you the highest FPS.

 

[bystander]

...does Physx only run on Nvidia GPUs? Not on the Intel Integrated GPU?

PhysX only runs on Nvidia GPU's, or on the CPU.

 

[NDDU Julius BSIT]

You don't want to dedicate your card to PhysX anyway, just leave it on auto. Otherwise it means you have one GPU processing physics only (for the games that work), you want both to share the load on rendering frames.

What does that mean? By the way I am running on a notebook

 

[nzalog]

You don't want to dedicate your card to PhysX anyway, just leave it on auto. Otherwise it means you have one GPU processing physics only (for the games that work), you want both to share the load on rendering frames.

What does that mean? By the way I am running on a notebook

He's saying to leave it on auto for the same reason i was saying. Some games don't use CPU much so by putting physx on the CPU you are using a resource which is not busy. GPU goes as fast as it can making frame after frame so by letting the CPU do physx you're letting you're offloading some graphics work to the CPU.

Again it comes down to leave it on auto.