Now here is something that caught me off guard. It appears that NVIDIA has removed GPU PhysX support for all 32-bit games in its latest RTX 50 series GPUs. As such, you will no longer be able to enjoy older GPU PhysX games at high framerates.

This means that the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 (and all other RTX50 series GPUs) cannot run games like Cryostasis, Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands 2, GRAW 2, Mirror’s Edge, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Bioshock Infinite with GPU-accelerated PhysX. Instead, you’ll have to rely on the CPU PhysX solution, which is similar to what AMD GPUs have been offering all these years.

This is such a shame as one of the best things about PC gaming is returning to older titles. The old PhysX games were quite demanding when they came out. I don’t know if I’m the minority here, but I really enjoyed most of them when they came out. And yes, when I got the RTX 4090, I tried Cryostasis’ tech demo so that I could finally see all those PhysX effects with high framerates.

NVIDIA claimed that the CUDA Driver will continue to support running 32-bit application binaries on GeForce RTX 40, GeForce RTX 30 series, GeForce RTX 20/GTX 16 series, GeForce GTX 10 series and GeForce GTX 9 series GPUs. However, it won’t support them on the GeForce RTX 50 series and newer architectures.

I honestly don’t know why NVIDIA has dropped support for them. It’s ironic because Mafia 2 with PhysX felt WAY BETTER than the ridiculous remaster we got in 2020. And now, if you want to replay it, you’ll have to stick with an older GPU. We are going backward here.

So, I went ahead and downloaded the Cryostasis Tech Demo. I remember that tech demo running smoothly as hell with the RTX 4090. So, how does it run on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D? Well, see for yourselves. Behold the power of CPU PhysX. 13FPS at 4K/Max Settings. Thanks NVIDIA. Ironically, the RTX 4090 (which still has GPU PhysX support) was able to push over 100FPS at 4K/Max Settings. Let this sink in.

This is such a huge disappointment. NVIDIA has dropped the ball here. And I get it, these are old games. However, there is no CPU capable of running them at acceptable framerates right now. So, these games have become unplayable in the blink of an eye.

I don’t know if NVIDIA will one day decide to correct this issue. After all, it appears to be mostly a driver issue. So, let’s hope that someone will be able to hack the CUDA drivers to add support for 32-bit games.

Here’s the list of all the GPU PhysX games that will now perform horribly on the RTX50 series.

Stay tuned for more!