Atomic Systems

This is just for my personal curiousity. There are some games that run better on ATI and some that run better on Nv cards. The load screen of Railworks has Nvidia plastered on it. So which one is it for Railworks?

Hypothetical situation:
Let's say I have £90 to burn on a "mainstream" graphics card. The Nvidia GTX 550ti and ATI 5770 are fairly equivalent on overall performance. If it was just Railworks though, which one would be the better bet?

...or, if I was filthy rich, a GTX680 or a 7970?

Nvidia cards have PhysX inbuilt into the GPU and ATi don't. There is PhysX in built into the game.

Therefore I would and have plumped for the Nvidia. ( Got a GTX 460 )

As a Basic rule of thum the more you pay the better the card, but for differing cards that have a similar spec the games can run faster on one over the other.

Also some games will use more processing rather than GPU. I was under the impression that the current game leans towards the Nvidia cam, but you would need comment form the railworks team to confirm.

rikrobson wrote:Nvidia cards have PhysX inbuilt into the GPU and ATi don't. There is PhysX in built into the game.

Therefore I would and have plumped for the Nvidia. ( Got a GTX 460 )

As a Basic rule of thum the more you pay the better the card, but for differing cards that have a similar spec the games can run faster on one over the other.

Also some games will use more processing rather than GPU. I was under the impression that the current game leans towards the Nvidia cam, but you would need comment form the railworks team to confirm.

RailWorks doesn't use hardware PhysX, its software only, so thats not an advantage in this case.

I don't think there is really any benefit to either AMD (ATi) or Nvidia with RailWorks as it isn't very GPU optimised. It also doesn't take any advantage of newer GPU features, so a somewhat older video card will work just as well and should save you some money.

If you have a preference to one brand or another, go with that, it won't make much if any difference to the performance of RailWorks.

Paul

To try and clarify:

rikrobson wrote:Nvidia cards have PhysX inbuilt into the GPU and ATi don't. There is PhysX in built into the game.

nVidia cards have had Phys-X processing ability built into the GPU since the 8xxx series, but there's an option in the nVidia Control Panel to force it to use either the CPU or the nVidia GPU. With the introduction of the 196 (I think) drivers, nVidia disabled support to run Phys-X on a GPU from another manufacturer, but they and AMD seem to have 'kissed and made up' a bit following pressure from the gaming community.

PaulH2 wrote:RailWorks doesn't use hardware PhysX, its software only, so thats not an advantage in this case.

Phys-X has always been software, though in the early days when it was developed by Ageia, hardware in the form of an add-in PPU (Physics Processing Unit) card was produced to take over the job of running the software. This line of hardware was dropped around 2009/2010 after nVidia had taken over Ageia and the cabability fully ported over to the GPU.

It should be noted that (apparently) ATI and Nvidia cards now work together. see.
http://www.ngohq.com/news/16560-patch-r ... esent.html
http://www.itproportal.com/2010/05/28/n ... ysx-block/
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=2253249
So one card can runthe physx and the other the graphics
I havnt a clue if it works , just read about it.
John

As for the comment on running older GPU's I've got an old 8800GT which cost a bloomin fortune back in 2007 when I bought it and she handles RW ok provided that I turn down some of the Graphics from Very High to just plain High. Normally I get 25-30 fps except in Woking, where it drops right down; never did like the place much anyway. The rest of the PC is 2.4Ghz Q6600 Quad Core, 3Gb Ram & 32bit Win7. I doubt even an Alienware monster worth £5000 would get RW2012 running smoothly, personally I'm waiting for Intel to develop Quantum Processors or Isolinear Systems, but I'll have been dead & buried a long time by then

Darren
73E

There's no particularly easy answer to this question when Physx is removed from the equation, as detailed by gptech.

I've flip-flopped a few times between Nvidia and ATi cards. My personal preference is for Nvidia since I generally experience fewer compatibility issues and more driver updates. But there are plenty whose experience would be the polar opposite, I am sure.

Other than personal preference and Physx, make sure you're buying from somewhere like Scan, Overclockers or Aria rather than a PC World, and you should be getting bang for your buck roughly equal to the amount of outlay (although don't particularly expect this to be the case with RW, natch ).

Well, i can't really answer your question but i am using an ATI Radeon HD 6850, and it brings me nothing but visual joy when it comes to TS2012 (TSX on) and the other couple of games that i play

Cheers
Terrone

Inthernet wrote:This is just for my personal curiousity. There are some games that run better on ATI and some that run better on Nv cards. The load screen of Railworks has Nvidia plastered on it. So which one is it for Railworks?

Well, I've been using an ATI Radeon HD 4650 1 GB card for the last 3 years and I think it's absolute rubbish in Railworks, especially for screenshots, so, there you have a multitude of personal experiences, sorry, you did want folks to give you an honest appraisal, didn't you??

Cheerz. Transport Steve.

Ati 4890 user here, have no complaints other than the card being old and slow. After Sdark's continuing nightmare with Asus 560Tis, not terribly confident about nVidia and RW...

Having said that I've got an i7 cpu and triple-channel XMS RAM, so that might be helping matters.

Kariban wrote:Ati 4890 user here, have no complaints other than the card being old and slow. After Sdark's continuing nightmare with Asus 560Tis, not terribly confident about nVidia and RW...

Having said that I've got an i7 cpu and triple-channel XMS RAM, so that might be helping matters.

Well I have an ATi 4870x2, but "only" a Core 2 Quad QX9770 and dual channel DDR 2 RAM and it runs TS2012 quite adequately (not always smooth as silk, but also never a "slide-show" or undriveable) and I have all the settings (except AA which is set to MSAA x8) maxed. I have an Nvidia 560 in a second machine so might give TS2012 a whirl on that sometime just for kicks...