NVIDIA has announced that PhysX is now open source, meaning that developers can use its latest version to GPU-accelerate the PhysX effects on graphics cards from AMD (and in the future from Intel).
According to NVIDIA, the PhysX SDK is a scalable multi-platform game physics solution supporting a wide range of devices, from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs. PhysX has already been integrated into some of the most popular game engines, including Unreal Engine (versions 3 and 4) and Unity3D.
Now some of you may never realized that PhysX has been used in a lot of games via its CPU-side. These PhysX CPU effects have been running in various games and were calculated by the CPU instead of the GPU. However, and since PhysX is now open source, developers can utilize GPUs in order to improve performance and offer better physics effects.
To be honest, I don’t expect the older PhysX GPU-accelerated games to work on AMD’s GPUs as the latest PhysX version is only open sourced. In theory, games using this new latest version will not be locked behind NVIDIA’s GPUs.
Here is hoping that we see more GPU-accelerated physics now that PhysX will work on all graphics cards!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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