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PhysX goes open source

layte

layte

layte

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14 Jun 2008
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http://techreport.com/news/27910/nvidia-physx-joins-the-open-source-party

If I were a game programmer, I'd be salivating at the bounty of cutting-edge souce code that's available free of charge. Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 are open books for anyone who wants to take a peek, and they've now been joined by PhysX. Nvidia has put the full source for PhysX 3.3.3 and its clothing and destruction components on GitHub.

The release appears to be related to Unreal Engine 4's recent liberation. PhysX powers Unreal's "core game physics," according to Epic co-founder and programming guru Tim Sweeney, and the code is accessible via the engine's repository. Interestingly, Sweeney says Nvidia is providing the "CPU-based implementation" of PhysX. GPU-specific source may remain under wraps.

Nvidia will be accepting changes to the code, Sweeney adds, and it may roll modifications into the "main PhysX branch." PhysX updates then will be shared with the community through future Unreal Engine iterations.

In an apparently separate effort, the PhysX SDK has been expanded from its Windows roots to cover Android, OS X, and Linux. The SDK and source have been released through Nvidia's GameWorks repository, as well. Instructions to gain access are available here.
Click to expand...

Now this is interesting. I wonder if all those armchair coders who were berating Nvidia for having 'obviously unoptimised' x87 code in their CPU PhysX path can improve things like they said it would be easy to.
 
AMD may have given Mantle code over, but by all accounts huge chunks have been ripped out (for example the shader language). Mantle itself is dead, and AMD never lived up to (or likely never expected to have to deliver on) their promises. The next version of OpenGL has given them an easy out from delivering on their typically grandiose claims.
 
Aye, but what I'm really interested in is what experts will make of the code. A few years back the usual suspects were making a huge song and dance about it being sub optimised x87 code, and that recompiling it would bring huge speed ups.
 
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