If you have the RTX 50 GPUs with you today, you may face issues running certain games with PhysX enabled – as recently spotted by users online, NVIDIA has silently removed 32-bit CUDA for its RTX 50 series GPUs, which meant 32-bit PhysX that some games relied on will no longer work properly.
Dead: 32-bit PhysX
In case you forgot, PhysX is a feature that uses physics simulations for graphics, which makes things like destruction effects, fabric animation, fluid and particle effects especially realistic. The feature was originally developed by NovodeX, and several acquisitions later the technology has been sold to NVIDIA, which directly integrates it into its GeForce GPUs.
However, just like ray tracing, PhysX is computationally expensive – the technology initially required a dedicated accelerator card to keep up with the GPU, though this is later integrated into all NVIDIA GPUs which handles calculations from there. The deprecation of the feature meant that PhysX can now only be run on CPUs, and naturally the performance absolutely tanks even with modern-day processors trying their best.
Of course, modern games no longer supported this feature due to developmental complexity (as in-engine solutions have proved to work better), and it also suffers with huge performance penalties when the feature is enabled in games, long before gamers debating on whether enabling ray tracing is worth the framerate tradeoff. As such, only a few games more than a decade old still have this feature implemented, making it one of the footnotes in the history of computer graphics at large.
Pokdepinion: It was a great technology, shame to see it go though.
