Hi all.. I have an ATI 7850 series card.. I can enable PhysX in the Sacred 2 options, but I understand this is an Nvidia feature...

So... Should I leave it enabled? Is there any effect for AMD users?

I have a nvidia card(amd before), and I play without PhysX...

If you have AMD card, then PhysX is usually processed via CPU - so it's better to turn it off.
Also, IMHO PhysX effects in this game look horrible - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guOu-nXf46g

Don't use it; PhysX will bring lag in the game.

As with any graphics setting, enable it. If you like it, keep it.

Given the age of the game and power of modern CPUs there shouldn't be to much of a performance hit. If there is, disable the option.

The option is misleading :

The game use PhysX effects whatever this option is turned on or off

the only difference if you turn it on ; it adds extra eye candy in the game

and of course It's out of question to turn it on , with an ATI card , unless you want severe fps drop (extras PhysX effects will be calculated by the CPU , as mentionned)

The game isn't so old,, you can still give it a try with those turned-on , but i won't expect miracle without an Nvidia card.

The eye-candy isn't essential, but i just watched a HD video showing differences with and without it side by side... It's interesting...

The Video - recommended you download the 720p version and then watch it. Most eye candy includes particles effects your skills give off, leaves blowing around, small pebbles being shoved away from around you when you have a shield on, etc. It's a surprise since i've only played the PS3/360 version so i've never seen this before, and it's disabled in my game.

Will i enable it now? Maybe as long as it doesn't tank my game. But it's not required.

Some games require that PhysX be present in the system--what I have done is simply install the *single* version of PhysX that works in all 3d games that require it (so that you don't have to install it over and over again with every game.) For AMD gpus w/ games that require PhysX, just install PhysX-9.12.0613 and you are done! That's all you need to do--install it once as a system-wide installation by itself, then whenever you install a game that requires PhysX and asks if you like to install it, simply select "No, thanks" because you already have the compatible version installed and the game will run fine--no slowdowns, no superfluous graphics, etc.

If you can't find the version I mention above--just Bing/Google it and you should find it with no difficulty (you can also get it directly from nVidia's site.) Works great with OSes up to Win8.1x64 & and the latest Catalysts up to 14.7RC3's.

The extra PhysX effects you get with Nvidia hardware are kind of nice - spell effects, at least, are very pretty.

However, even with an Nvidia card I had performance hits and lag so bad that I disabled it. I have a GTX760 4GB, so it really shouldn't have been a problem.

Someone said you should be able to run it on CPU. Well, maybe. However, PhysX is terribly optimized on CPU, and single-threaded, so even a high-end CPU isn't going to give you a good framerate. Newer versions of the PhysX SDK are better optimized, and the 3.x one should finally give half-decent CPU performance. But not in an old game like this.

Basically, unless you have an Nvidia card I'd forget it. And even if you DO have a nice Nvidia card, it's pretty much broken and will run terribly.

It just depends! I remember the first Risen game, it also used PhysX. With NVidia GPUs it ran on the GPU and with all other GPUs it ran on the CPU, but as far as I remember the effects were completely the same, with the little difference, that the performance with the NVidia GPUs were slower BECAUSE PhysX ran on the GPU while it was faster when you disabled PhysX on GPU!

I dont think that the difference for most effects is that big at all, even if the GPU performs better in such calculations because of the architecture and the huge rough power it has. But the main problem is, that it does much more than just calculating physical effects.

The more important thing is the question about the bottleneck. Just let us think about a game that does heavy use of the CPU but almost no use of the GPU, in such a case would PhysX on the CPU decrease the performance heavily while PhysX on the GPU had almost no effect to the performance at all. Also the opposite could be true, that a game does heavy use of the GPU but almost no use of the CPU, in such a scenario the PhysX calculation on the GPU would kill the performance while PhysX on the CPU had almost no effect.

Most games today do heavy use of the GPU, because with all those little shader programs more and more of the game is calculated on the GPU instead of the CPU. The CPU is today in many games just for data moving to the GPU responsible and almost for nothing else. In such a case, calculating the Physics on the CPU would be the much better option, because it would do almost no hit to the performance, especially if it is calculated in one or more separated threads on cores which wouldnt be used otherwise.

Another point is the question about the hardware the user uses. One could combine a big CPU with a little GPU and another one could combine a big GPU with a little CPU both would experience something completely different with the same game.

What I want to say is, as mentioned at the beginning, that it completely depends.

I myself dont know how Sacred 2 works, but I wouldnt generally deny what he said.