M17x - CrossFire 4870s and 9400m for PhysX?

Hey Guys

Obviously I don't have my M17x until wednesday but I was wondering if some ATI users or anyone else might be able to tell me. Is it theoretically possible for ATI users to have both the ATI gpu's and the 9400m on at the same time with the nVidia integrated GPU doing PhysX for the system?

I ask because when you install stock Nvidia drivers for the mobile chipset from Nvidia's website it also installs PhysX. Maybe the 9400m could act like the physx card for the system?

Or can you only have either ATI cards on or either Nvidia GPU on. I also realize the 9400m isnt that powerful but I was wondering about this scenario.

Thanks

 

I doubt it. I highly doubt an ATI card will work with the nVidia 9400M.

 

Even if it would, the 9400M would be far too weak for PhysX. You're better off of letting the CPU do the physics calculations.
I wish AMD/ATi hadn't nixed the modded ATi driver project that allowed for PhysX on AMD/ATi cards. That would have been nice.

 

It may be possible, under Win7 where you can install both sets of drivers. A mod was recently released which disabled the code preventing hardware physx from running when ATI cards were found in the system (for desktops using ATI main and Nv secondary/physx).

It would really depend on whether the 9400 is actually disabled or not. That said as has already been mentioned...limited usability, its not going to be much faster than the CPU.

 

Yeah, I hear you even if it can work somehow, the 9400m doesn't have the brainpower to deliver strong PhysX performance anyway.

Ah well slight downgrade on my machine in that department - well all know the M1730 was the PhysX king

At least the ATI's do Audio over HDMI. Pros and cons of ATI vs nVidia!

 

The 9400M is where the PhysX controller is built in. It's really a "do it all" chip. Someone earlier (I think it was Phinagle) posted a link to a hack to make PhysX work with the ATI cards. As far as I know there's nothing to make Hybrid SLI work with ATI.

 

Of course it is, it supports CUDA. It would certainly be interesting to see how the integrated 9400 fared as the dedicated PhysX/CUDA processor leaving the dedicated card(s) only the graphics rendering.
However, I doubt it's powerful enough to handle PhysX/CUDA (especially since it's using system memory instead of dedicated, fast onboard memory). You're probably better off when your SLI rig/dedicated videocard handles PhysX/CUDA and graphics at the same time. Modern CPUs might be better suited for it as well. That said, I believe PhysX will only work on cards with dedicated memory (which the integrated 9400 doesn't have), but I may be mistaken.

Well, that hack is just a hack to allow AMD/ATi cards to utilize an Nvidia card for PhysX operations with the latest Windows 7 Nvidia drivers. Earlier Nvidia drivers allowed it by default. It's a stupid move that Nivida added in that nerf, as it would only do them good to sell more video cards even to avid AMD/ATi fans. Who cares if it's used for graphics or PhysX/CUDA, as long as the card is sold to somebody, right?

Yeah, that won't work, unless ATi and Nvidia colaborated on driver development (or somebody managed to rewrite both drivers to allow it). But even then, it might not be possible.

FYI, some independent people modded ATi drivers and PhysX software over a year ago when Nvidia released PhysX to run on their GPUs and it worked well on ATi GPUs. AMD/ATi, however, had the project shut down (Nvidia even endorsed it, as far as I recall, to gain a wider user base of the PhysX technology they had aquired). Anyway, these modded drivers never made it to public. It's a pity.

 

http://www.ngohq.com/news/16560-patch-re-enables-physx-when-ati-card-is-present.html

 

Nvidia is blocking PhysX from working if any ATI hardware is installed in the system. Aside from that however, you must have discrete memory for the GPU to run PhysX, so the 9400m cannot do this as it uses shared memory