GPU stuck in 8x and not 16x? Physx on ATI card?

plutoniumman

New Member
Hi,
I just got a new GPU and it's awesome. However GPU-Z and other apps report that my GPU is in only 8x speed. It's a Radeon HD 6850. This is my first good GPU (all others were PCI or integrated) and not sure what I'm doing wrong.

I know my PCI-e port is 16x, because I have 4 16x ports and one 8x port. It's not in the 8x port, because I can see one port where the pins are physically missing and the GPU isn't in that port.

Would putting it in 16x make any difference, anyway?



Other question: (better than 2 threads I suppose)
I heard about a hack that would let Physx enabled games take advantage of the GPU for processing physics on non NVIDIA cards. I searched google but couldn't really find anything. Mostly just people saying there's a thread around somewhere about this... Well that thread doesn't seem to exist lol. Is it actually possible or not to use an ATI/AMD chip (preferably a Radeon HD 6850) for NVIDIAs physx? ALso would it need to be incrossfire mode?
 

CardboardSword

New Member
Well as far as the Psyx thing goes, I'm pretty sure discussing such hacks here are against the rules. I have heard of people using an nVidia card for Psyx with an ATI/AMD card as the primary adapter, but again, pretty sure that's a taboo topic around here. As far as your 6850 running in 8x mode, I'm kind of puzzled. It could be some weird quirk with your mobo. Try putting it in a different slot maybe? 5 Pci-e slots on one board is ridiculous, what mobo do you have? Even if it doesn't work, the good news is that despite the huge amount of information processed by todays GPUs, we still haven't used anywhere close to the full 16 lanes of PCI-E 2.0, so the performance impact running it in 8x is negligible if you can't fix it.
 

StrangleHold

Moderator
Staff member
Hi,
I just got a new GPU and it's awesome. However GPU-Z and other apps report that my GPU is in only 8x speed. It's a Radeon HD 6850. This is my first good GPU (all others were PCI or integrated) and not sure what I'm doing wrong.

I know my PCI-e port is 16x, because I have 4 16x ports and one 8x port. It's not in the 8x port, because I can see one port where the pins are physically missing and the GPU isn't in that port.

Would putting it in 16x make any difference, anyway?

What model motherboard is it?
 

linkin

VIP Member
x8 has almost zero performance loss, x4 is where you start to lose performance. I wouldn't worry about it.
 

joh06937

New Member
As long as the first one is in the first slot and the second one is in the second slot down from the top, you should be fine. And, as Linkin said, you wouldn't notice and real difference even if the second one was actually operating at 8x.

As stated above, talking about Physx hacking isn't allowed on here. Although the 257.15 drivers do allow you to use a physx card with an [strike]ATi[/strike] AMD card without using any hacking, so technically you could ask questions about how to do AMD+Nvidia with those drivers. But you can always google how to do it with other drivers.
 
Last edited:

mrjack

VIP Member
Other question: (better than 2 threads I suppose)
I heard about a hack that would let Physx enabled games take advantage of the GPU for processing physics on non NVIDIA cards. I searched google but couldn't really find anything. Mostly just people saying there's a thread around somewhere about this... Well that thread doesn't seem to exist lol. Is it actually possible or not to use an ATI/AMD chip (preferably a Radeon HD 6850) for NVIDIAs physx? ALso would it need to be incrossfire mode?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: no and here's why. PhysX uses nVidia's proprietary CUDA technology to offload the calculations on to the GPU. Hopefully Bullet will be implemented in future games as it supports OpenCL, which means that anyone with hardware that supports OpenCL (AMD, nVidia, Intel etc.) would be able to offload the physics calculations to a GPU.
 
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