Believe it or not, Nvidia wasn’t always the gargantuan AI-chasing douche-bro of the company that it is today. Once upon a time, we had weird, questionably useful technologies such as Nvidia PhysX, which was objectively awesome and no one will convince me otherwise. Sadly, PhysX is on its way out.
Now, to be perfectly clear, it’s not like Nvidia PhysX was at all important for the modern gaming industry. Though it did reach reasonable adoption back in the early 2010s, it’s been effectively defunct for the longest time. The most prolific games to adopt PhysX in its heyday wereBorderlands 2(as featured in the video below),Fallout 4, andBatman: Arkham Knight. And, to be sure, PhysX really was little more than a fancy visual flourish at the best of times. Still, it saddens me to report that Nvidia RTX 5000 graphics cards no longer support a massive number of PhysX-enabled features. That’s becauseNvidia has silently removed support for 32-bit PhsyXfrom the new graphics processors.
Nvidia RTX 5000 no longer supports PhysX, will happily tank your frame rate instead
What this means in a practical sense is that if you own an RTX 5000 GPU and wish to enable PhysX effects in, say, Borderlands 2, you should prepare for a proper slide show. Not that PhysX was ever particularly performant, of course, but RTX 5000 cards now have to offload all PhysX calculations onto the CPU, leading to a framerate resembling a slide show.
Honestly, even though PhysX always felt more like a tech demo than anything else, it genuinely did appear transformative in some situations. Was it worth enabling, considering the performance drop? Not at all, no, butgosh darndid it look neat. BetweenBorderlands 2‘s wonky and unoptimized “fluid” effects andFallout 4‘s forever-broken PhysX clutter, it’s a big shame that Nvidia never did anything meaningful with the tech. Now we know for sure, though, that it never will.
The silver lining in this entire situation is that 64-bit PhysX is still supported, even on RTX 5000 GPUs. It’s just that you won’t find all that many 64-bit games leveraging the tech in the first place. The prime example (and arguably PhysX’s best showpiece, bar none) of the tech in action isBatman: Arkham Knight, where PhysX runs the frankly phenomenal volumetric fog, clutter simulation, cloth simulation, and a few other tidbits. Note thatit’snota cheap effect to have running, even on halo-tier graphics cards.
In other physics-related news, even though Nvidia PhysX is now officially dead and gone, Havok isn’t! The company behind one of the most ubiquitous physics engines of all timerecently pushed out a fancy new destruction trailer. It might not materialize into anything serious anytime soon, but just knowing that Havok is still pushing the envelope somewhere in the background sure does make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
