PhysX goes open source

[Harlequin]

With all the driver hubub this seems to have flown under the radar :

Nvidia open-sources PhysX engine, including GPU kernel code

Nvidia recently announced that its PhysX engine would become a fully open-source project. The developers have now released the source code under the permissive BSD-3 license and...

www.techspot.com

Nvidia recently announced that its PhysX engine would become a fully open-source project. The developers have now released the source code under the permissive BSD-3 license and are inviting the community to experiment and tinker. Modders interested in keeping older games alive will likely benefit the most from this development.

Lets see if 32bit CUDA PhysX can be working again on RTX 50xx series cards?

or, as a minor miracle, the ancient PPU based PhysX cards can be brought back to life one more time

 

[Kelt]

Would love to see more PhysX in games, underrated GFX effect IMO.

Still amazing to see it in effect in the Batman games.

 

[loftie]

Same - assuming they manage to get it working well regardless of GPU.

 

[threebagsfull]

Would love to see more PhysX in games, underrated GFX effect IMO.

Still amazing to see it in effect in the Batman games.

What is it useful for? There was a bit of buzz about it.... literally years ago. I think I last remember reading about it when Borderlands 2 came out

I got the impression that a lot of modern engines basically added their own physics stuff.

 

[Kelt]

What is it useful for? There was a bit of buzz about it.... literally years ago. I think I last remember reading about it when Borderlands 2 came out

I got the impression that a lot of modern engines basically added their own physics stuff.

I've not seen any physics effects quite like it, especially walking through smoke.

 

[Combat squirrel]

I've not seen any physics effects quite like it, especially walking through smoke.

Thing is, were they just doing that for the sake of it - i.e. with modern havoc engines could you do that anyway and devs just choose not to just because? Or were they just overly physicsing to try and sell physx cards back in the day ?

 

[threebagsfull]

I've not seen any physics effects quite like it, especially walking through smoke.

Some of those scenes are ok, but some of them appear to be highly unrealistic (and I'm not talking about a guy in a bat costume doing backflips )

I watched that and thought, 'but leaves don't move like that,' and other similar issues. It seems like some of the objects are weightless, in order to exaggerate the interactions between them and the player.

 

[Harlequin]

What about drivers?

 

[Gray2233]

What is it useful for? There was a bit of buzz about it.... literally years ago. I think I last remember reading about it when Borderlands 2 came out

I got the impression that a lot of modern engines basically added their own physics stuff.

Originally PhysX was a stand alone product designed by a company called Ageia, and later acquired by Nvidia. The point was largely related to hardware accelerated physics, you actually had to buy a stand alone add in card until Nvidia took over and baked it into their GPU's, and even then some people ran a second/cheaper GPU to load off the physics in some games.

The most prevalent physics engine to my memory for many years was Havok, and it did some extremely impressive things that I don't feel PhysX really matched for a good few years in actual games despite some impressive tech demos. Nvidia pushed it quite heavily upon acquiring it and there were some impressive uses, but with it being proprietary and some other issues it never really took off the way they probably hoped. Then there's the fact a lot of the things they claimed were "improved" by PhysX came across as kinda artificial, as we'd seen similar effects in other games without for years and without the performance hit.

It was a technology with a lot of potential that never fully realised it, but it did have some stand out moments where it really did look awesome.

Here's a list of games using the tech to some degree that's worth a look:

List of games that support Nvidia PhysX - PCGamingWiki PCGW - bugs, fixes, crashes, mods, guides and improvements for every PC game

www.pcgamingwiki.com

 

[Harlequin]

It died once Nvidia locked it up to their own hardware. Similar to GSync is now

 

[StriderX]

They abandoned it didn't they?

I can't imagine they're doing it out of the goodness of their rock solid, frozen hearts.

 

[Sin_Chase]

It died once Nvidia locked it up to their own hardware. Similar to GSync is now

What?

It wasnt available to the regular gamer/consumer UNTIL nVidia brought it to nVidia hardware. Nobody was buying Ageia hardware acceleration for games.

It has never been available on AMD so your statement makes absolutely no sense.

Likewise VRR was accelerated into the market by nVidia and resulted in the position we are in now. Without GSYNC I'm not sure we would have the mature VRR products available now.