will old nvidia cards run as efficient as newer cards in hybrid physx?

[Stoney_Yoshi]

hello i own a radeon 6950 and i want to enjoy the physx parts of games i own. i was curious if i would see much of a difference in physx performance with a 200 series card compared to a 300 or 400 series card?  i want to spend as little as possible to get proper physx performance on high physx settings.

[Zogrim]

It does makes sense to buy a newer card for PhysX (as GPU PhysX gets additionally optimized per architercture), but in mid-end sector you'll face a lot of rebranding, so you need to be carefull.

For example, GTS 250 is a slightly enhanced version of 9800 GTX+, which was an enhanced version of 8800 Ultra.

GTS 450, in comparison, is based on GF106 (Fermi) chip

So, I would recommend to look at number of CUDA cores and GPU clock in the first place.

[Stoney_Yoshi]

i was looking at a gtx280 with 240 cuda cores and the clock speed is at  621 mhz. not sure if thats good enough.

[Zogrim]

Not a bad choise performance wise, if you are ok with it's power consumption, noise, heat, etc.

Also, some additional links you might find helpfull
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbww3dhzK0M
http://physxinfo.com/news/tag/benchmark/

[Stoney_Yoshi]

Thank you! those links helped out. i think if anything ill go and buy a used gtx280 and try it out. if it isnt good enough. it wont hurt my wallet as much.