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Nvidia Kills PhysX (Die Shrink Telegrams) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-02-20 20:18:29
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Matt from Alderon Games will be joining Tom in 1 hour (sorry for the short notice) for a brief discussion on why Nvidia killing PhysX support matters. Write in below with any thoughts or questions you have!

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/physx-quietly-retired-on-rtx-50-series-gpus-nvidia-ends-32-bit-cuda-app-support

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dUjUNrbHis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX

Comments

Wasmachineman_NL

Am I the only one who's indifferent to Nvidia killing off PhysX?

Zach J

Is now the optimal time to buy a PhysX add-in card?

nonews

Would games not just fall back on an alternate path like when running on an AMD card?

Resident Mexican

Hello Tom and Matt. Why do you think Nvidia has stopped pushing and updating PhysX? I feel like hugely improved game physics would make for much better marketing than AI hallucinated frames

coltmarshmallow

Is this planned obsolescence? How long before ray tracing and dlss are killed off?

Cleansweep

Do you think that we might see more issues with games having problems as driver teams stop supporting features over time? And what could be a viable solution for games where people don't have mod SDKs to help patch the game?

Alexander

Apologies if this is a dumb question, but does this mean that there'll now be games that ran fine on 40 series but won't run on 50 series? Or was it not required to run, just made things look better? I feel like physics are still an area where games can improve. I remember being so wowed the first time I played HL2 and being able to pick up and move everything. Almost 20 years later and not many games have matched, let alone beat, it.

Planet 9

Having biult my first PC in 2016 PhysX has never crossed my path, but I’m a bit surprised they removed support. I would’ve expected them to wait until the cpu fallback would have been at a reasonable level of performance (or spent some dev time to optimize it) . But it seems that most games seem to have a PhysX toggle and therefore won’t completely break said games.

Frobozz

I remember when Physx cards came out. They filled a crucial gap in game realism that I really admired at a time where the computing power necessary for physics simulation was lacking. Do you have any fond memories of games that used Phsyx to raise the quality bar?

Nathan Schied

As cool as it was, it was only really used as decoration, rather than for gameplay mechanics, but there's really 2 things needed for games to simulate reality: path tracing and atomic level physics. It feels like a step back to be cutting ties with this technology, and also something that their AI could massively accelerate if they wanted. I can only imagine the possibilities. I read some people mentioning some sort of translation layer the community may be able to make, either to re enable it or even get it running on AMD cards. Do you see this being likely, or even possible?

AI Generated Fish

Hi Tom and Matt. Do you think Nvidias repeated slights of gamers first for mining now for AI will backfire? Ending physx seems minor but after Blackwell pricing & supply following a very lackluster Lovelace it seems like they feel like they can do whatever and the gaming market will still be there.

Nathan Schied

I don't there has been support cut for anything as big as this recently, but I imagine that you'll still be able to run it indefinitely on older hardware, which includes the 4090. The drivers are a separate additional module, which is why you can run PhysX on CPU if you don't have an Nvidia card. I imagine by the time 40 series cards are old and dying, CPUs will be fast enough that it's an acceptable way of playing those games. Also, as disappointing as it is, I don't believe there are games where PhysX is required to play, I think it's always been an additional graphics setting for eye candy.

kwerboom

I'm aware that PhysX started off as its own independent thing before Nvidia bought it. But after it became a proprietary Nvidia feature, did PhysX become pointless? Few games used it when it was its own add-on card and fewer still after it became tied to Nvidia and CUDA. AMD tried to get a competitor going with OpenCL that never got traction. I know Ray Tracing isn't the same technology, but it seems like Ray Tracing is what's going to take off better and with better support than PhysX ever had.

Dark Side of the Force

With the death of 32 bit PhysX, what is your thoughts on propritary vendor-specific tech in PC games now with a known possibility of being dropped from support in the future and no feasible substitude?

Swiggles

Hey Tom and Matt! What, do you want to replace physX. Do you think any physics-based AI models will actually utilize the new cards performance.

Ketafuki

The ZLUDA dev once wrote a breakdown of what it would take to create a compatibility layer for 32-bit PhysX, but I don't think anyone's tried tackling it yet.

xpk20040228

HL2 doesn't use PhysX tho, PhysX is just a gimmick to nerf Radeon cards