March 14, 2025
Nvidia’s 50-series Cards Drop support for Physx, with influence on older games

Nvidia’s 50-series Cards Drop support for Physx, with influence on older games

Nvidia’s Physx offer to developers did not always generate warm feelings. As part of the wider package from GamesWorks, Physx was one of the reasons The Witcher 3 ran on a remarkable suboptimal levels at the launch. Protagonist Geralt’s hair, shown in Physx-driven hairpieces, was a burden for some chipsets.

Physx started to appear in general game engines, such as Unity 5, and was ultimately open-sourced, first in a limited computer and mobile form, then wider. As an application packed in Nvidia’s 32-bit Cuda API and platform, the Physx engine had a built-in shelf life. Now the expiry date is known and it is conditional to buy NVIDIAs 50-series video cards and approach them reasonable human prices.

Dune Buggy in Borderlands 3, evasive missiles shot by a floating attack vessel slightly over a sand dune, in Borderlands 3.

Do you see that smoke? It is originally from Sweden.

Credit: gearbox/Take 2

Do you see that smoke? It is originally from Sweden.


Credit: gearbox/Take 2

The real dynamic particles were the friends we made …

NVIDIA noted in mid-January that 32-bit applications cannot be developed or error detection on the latest versions of his Cuda toolkit. They are still on cards for the 50 series. From a technical point of view, you can also keep an older map on your system installed for compatibility, which is a real dedication to particle physics at the beginning of 2010.

From a technical point of view, a 64-bit game could still support Phyx on the latest GPUs from NVIDIA, but the heyday of Physx, as an independent technology engaged in game settings, tended to coincide with the 32-bit computing. era.

If you now load a 32-bit game with Physx enabled (or forced in a configuration file) and a 50-series NVIDIA GPU installed, chances are that the physics work will be passed on to the CPU instead of the GPU, probably bottleneckinging The game and the steep lowering the frame speeds. Of course, switching out PhysX completely increased frame reasons above even native GPU support levels.

Demanding Borderlands 2 Keep using Physx, made it so that it “drives terribly”, noticed on a redditor, even if the dust clouds and fladlapping fabric strips looked interesting. Other games with Physx ingrained, as mentioned by Resetera Completists, include Metro 2033, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flagand the 2013 Rigid trait game.

Commentators on Reddit and Resetera note that many of the aforementioned games mentioned had performance problems with Physx long before Nvidia forced them to switch off or be loaded on a CPU. For some games, however, Physx made the voidable environments, “Dynamic Bank Notes” and “Posters” possible (in the Arkham Games), liquid simulations and basic gameplay physics.

Everyone who works in or for the preservation of games has always had their work cut for them. But it is a particularly difficult challenge to see certain aspects of the operation of a game lost of the forward march of the CUDA platform, something that is more difficult to explain than a scratched CD or Windows compatibility.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *