Go 64 bit. Memory is soo cheap now, that you could shove some more in and Win7 64 bit can happily take it.
Memory prices have gone up over 100% for DDR2 in the last 4 months, DDR3 is the only cheap stuff now as they seem to have finished switching production over.
Bought a BFG nVidia GeForce 210 on Xmas eve. Whacked it in and Win7 installed with no issues at all...had it running for hours with no BSoDs or anything.
This temporary GPU also has the PhysX stuff...so that cannae be a factor.
But due to the bad weather, Scan couldn't collect my GTX 260. So the RMA got extended until mid-Jan and I have to send it back early Jan.
So it'll be towards end of Jan I think until I find out...must say though that this relatively cheap GeForce 210 is handling everything I chuck at it so far...
seems that it's this PhysX shit on the card that's causing my woes.
There is no extra hardware on the card for PhysX. PhysX is just software part of which is accelerated by running it on the gfx card. Basically GPUs these days are general purpose streaming processors with a few bits of special purpose hardware to help with certain graphics related tasks (eg. fetching from textures and converting from common texture formats to floating point). They can be used for non-graphics tasks too though (although it must be a task that fits the streaming processing model well, physics and collision detection can be made to fit quite well - it has to be a task that can be performed on 10000s of threads with no [or very few] dependencies between them).
Generally if you are having issues when running games that use PhysX it just means that you have having issues when the gfx card is being stressed. This should not happen though - you should be able to run the card at 100% indefinately with no problems, so either the card has a fault or some other component in your system does (eg. memory or PSU).
That is a fundamentally wrong statement. PhysX is now, and has been for 18ish months been built into nvidea cards. Since they bought the technology it has stopped being a software project and has been integrated into hardware.
This is probably a bad move but it's built into "ROM" now rather than drivers.
The driver aspect only controls what and which bits you can access, its all there, ready and waiting for your abuse.
That is a fundamentally wrong statement. PhysX is now, and has been for 18ish months been built into nvidea cards. Since they bought the technology it has stopped being a software project and has been integrated into hardware.
This is probably a bad move but it's built into "ROM" now rather than drivers.
The driver aspect only controls what and which bits you can access, its all there, ready and waiting for your abuse.
No, you are wrong. I program these things for a living, I know what I'm talking about ;p PhysX on nVidia cards is purely software. You can do everything it does using CUDA (and in fact - probably their implementation is written in CUDA too).
There is NO PhysX specific hardware on the card.
The PhysX card that the original PhysX ran on WAS hardware, but... it actually bore much more than a passing resemblance to a GPU ;) nVidia bought the company realising that they could adapt the software pretty easily to run on their GPUs... and did.
Do not be surprised to see other physics libraries (well... there is only one now really) running on GPUs before long.
PhysX on nVidia cards is purely software. You can do everything it does using CUDA (and in fact - probably their implementation is written in CUDA too).
*nod*
PhysX is indeed built on top of CUDA. Software only.
The term PhysX can also refer to the PPU add in card designed by Ageia to accelerate PhysX-enabled video games.
In September 2009 Nvidia came under heavy criticism when end-users discovered that their latest drivers disabled all PhysX hardware-acceleration for configurations containing any non-Nvidia graphics card including even original AGEIA PhysX cards if they run along a non-Nvidia graphics cards.
A physics processing unit (PPU) is a processor specially designed to alleviate calculations from the CPU, specifically calculations involving physics. Soon after the release of Ageia's PPU, graphics card manufacturers announced plans to implement similar functionality via the GPU. Support for the Ageia PPU solution was dropped for Windows 7.
So, are we all collectively saying gentlemen that it sounds like the GTX 260 GPU I originally bought is looking goosed and I have just been unlucky this time?
To the best of everyones knowledge, there should be no reason why a Gainward "Golden Sample" GTX 260 1792Mb GPU should not work with a Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit installation - and that installation has been tried using the latest Gainward drivers AND the latest drivers direct from nVidia. (In fact using that card sent an XP Pro installation doo-lally as well...but would a card with such spec do that to a 32b OS? Or is that extra proof of a nonced card??)
(I'm ruling out any other hardware failure due to the fact that my new PC has been happily running with ZERO problems since Xmas Eve - everything on-board is reporting correctly)
Comments
Go 64 bit. Memory is soo cheap now, that you could shove some more in and Win7 64 bit can happily take it.
Memory prices have gone up over 100% for DDR2 in the last 4 months, DDR3 is the only cheap stuff now as they seem to have finished switching production over.
Bought a BFG nVidia GeForce 210 on Xmas eve. Whacked it in and Win7 installed with no issues at all...had it running for hours with no BSoDs or anything.
This temporary GPU also has the PhysX stuff...so that cannae be a factor.
But due to the bad weather, Scan couldn't collect my GTX 260. So the RMA got extended until mid-Jan and I have to send it back early Jan.
So it'll be towards end of Jan I think until I find out...must say though that this relatively cheap GeForce 210 is handling everything I chuck at it so far...
There is no extra hardware on the card for PhysX. PhysX is just software part of which is accelerated by running it on the gfx card. Basically GPUs these days are general purpose streaming processors with a few bits of special purpose hardware to help with certain graphics related tasks (eg. fetching from textures and converting from common texture formats to floating point). They can be used for non-graphics tasks too though (although it must be a task that fits the streaming processing model well, physics and collision detection can be made to fit quite well - it has to be a task that can be performed on 10000s of threads with no [or very few] dependencies between them).
Generally if you are having issues when running games that use PhysX it just means that you have having issues when the gfx card is being stressed. This should not happen though - you should be able to run the card at 100% indefinately with no problems, so either the card has a fault or some other component in your system does (eg. memory or PSU).
This is probably a bad move but it's built into "ROM" now rather than drivers.
The driver aspect only controls what and which bits you can access, its all there, ready and waiting for your abuse.
No, you are wrong. I program these things for a living, I know what I'm talking about ;p PhysX on nVidia cards is purely software. You can do everything it does using CUDA (and in fact - probably their implementation is written in CUDA too).
There is NO PhysX specific hardware on the card.
The PhysX card that the original PhysX ran on WAS hardware, but... it actually bore much more than a passing resemblance to a GPU ;) nVidia bought the company realising that they could adapt the software pretty easily to run on their GPUs... and did.
Do not be surprised to see other physics libraries (well... there is only one now really) running on GPUs before long.
*nod*
PhysX is indeed built on top of CUDA. Software only.
To the best of everyones knowledge, there should be no reason why a Gainward "Golden Sample" GTX 260 1792Mb GPU should not work with a Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit installation - and that installation has been tried using the latest Gainward drivers AND the latest drivers direct from nVidia. (In fact using that card sent an XP Pro installation doo-lally as well...but would a card with such spec do that to a 32b OS? Or is that extra proof of a nonced card??)
(I'm ruling out any other hardware failure due to the fact that my new PC has been happily running with ZERO problems since Xmas Eve - everything on-board is reporting correctly)