NVIDIA’s latest and greatest family of graphics cards improve on what’s come before in just about every way, if not by much. However, in one area, these cards have regressed in a small but important way: PhysX.
Specifically, NVIDIA has dropped 32-bit CUDA support, which means games that use 32-bit PhysX are now effectively unplayable on NVIDIA’s latest cards, unless you turn this feature off completely. Is this a big deal? It’s not going to be an issue for most gamers, but the fact that NVIDIA didn’t really announce this feature removal in any significant way, and that a decent number of important titles are affected, is still something to be concerned about when it comes to game preservation.
What Is PhysX?
PhysX is a proprietary physics simulation technology that enables game engines to perform complex real-time simulations of things like cloth, water, particles, and destructible environments.
NVIDIA didn’t invent PhysX. Instead, the technology (and hardware) was introduced by a company called Ageia, which sold dedicated PhysX cards that you’d plug in alongside your graphics card. It didn’t take long before NVIDIA swooped in and bought the technology outright. So now PhysX is integrated into NVIDIA GPUs, and the calculations happen on a single card.
PhysX Isn’t Completely Gone
It’s important to understand that PhysX itself is still here. Games that use the 64-bit version of PhysX (such as Batman: Arkham Knight) will run just fine on the latest NVIDIA cards.
However, games that use the 32-bit version of PhysX (e.g. Batman: Arkham Asylum) will now default to using the CPU to perform those PhysX calculations. Despite how powerful modern CPUs are, they aren’t suitable for the types of parallel processing that PhysX needs, so even a fast computer with a beefy CPU will choke on PhysX calculations while that 50-series card sits idle, watching it all happen.
But, PhysX Is Optional, So Who Cares?
The thing is, not a lot of games implemented PhysX, and in those that did, it was always optional. Since AMD cards couldn’t offer PhysX and the technology had a performance overhead that was often too much on lower-end cards, almost all the PhysX games that now won’t run properly used it in a mostly cosmetic way.
That’s an argument I have read multiple times now since news of the 32-bit PhysX removal became widely known, and I just don’t buy it. This was a feature that makes up part of the highest quality visual settings for those games, which means it’s the way the developers ideally wanted people to experience the world.
So, if this feature doesn’t work properly, it means the game can’t be properly preserved on this and future generations of NVIDIA cards.
NVIDIA Has a Great History of Game Support
Mirror’s Edge
If you’ve been following the saga of Intel’s Arc graphics cards, you’ll know that one of the key issues with their technology is a lack if good support for older games. When the Arc cards first launched, games that ran on DirectX 9, for example, would perform poorly because the cards and drivers did not natively support that API.
While Intel has been catching up, the fact that this is an issue at all shows you that PC gamers like to play older titles. One of the best things about PC gaming is that you have access to decades of amazing games. Both NVIDIA and AMD have steadfastly kept native support for older video game technologies so that you can play a DX9 game as easily today as you could when it first came out. Easier even.
That’s not to say that this backwards compatibility is seamless or universal, but that dropping 32-bit PhysX with no alternative solution seems a little out of character for NVIDIA. Honestly, it’s a little worrying in the context that the company now (as reported by Tom’s Hardware) makes almost 90% of its revenue from AI data centers.
So here’s me hoping that gaming doesn’t become an afterthought as its share of the company’s attention dwindles.
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What Are the Options?
The best solution would be for NVIDIA to come up with a software solution that still allows performant 32-bit PhysX processing. I don’t know if it’s possible using some sort of translation layer, I’m not a hardware or software engineer, but in any event a good solution will likely only come from NVIDIA.
Still, there’s always a hope that some sort of community solution can happen, but PhysX is proprietary, so its not like just anyone can legally go rummaging around its inner working and release their own software.
The other alternative is to stick with NVIDIA’s 40-series cards or older for now, which is a temporary solution. You can also add a second GPU to your computer next to that 50-series or later card. Since you can specify which GPU in your system should handle PhysX. So maybe pick up an old RTX 2060 or something and dedicate it to PhysX. This is an expensive solution, but it is the best of both worlds right now.
I fully understand that NVIDIA had to consider a long list of things and can probably justify dropping 32-bit PhysX support from a big-picture perspective. However, from a PR perspective, and from the perspective that this company was built with the support of enthuisiast gamers, it just doesn’t feel right.
