PhysX is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

realtime

physics engine A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain physical systems, typically classical dynamics, including rigid body dynamics (including collision detection), soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics. I ...

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to imple ...

SDK developed by

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

as part of the Nvidia GameWorks

software suite A software suite (also known as an application suite) is a collection of computer programs (application software, or programming software) of related functionality, sharing a similar user interface and the ability to easily exchange data with eac ...

. Initially, video games supporting PhysX were meant to be accelerated by PhysX PPU (

expansion card In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus sl ...

s designed by Ageia). However, after Ageia's acquisition by Nvidia, dedicated PhysX cards have been discontinued in favor of the

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

being run on

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

-enabled GeForce GPUs. In both cases,

hardware acceleration Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calcula ...

allowed for the offloading of physics calculations from the CPU, allowing it to perform other tasks instead. PhysX and other middleware physics engines are used in many video games today because they allow game developers to save development time by not having to write their own code that implements

classical mechanics Classical mechanics is a Theoretical physics, physical theory describing the motion of objects such as projectiles, parts of Machine (mechanical), machinery, spacecraft, planets, stars, and galaxies. The development of classical mechanics inv ...

(Newtonian physics). To do, for example, soft body dynamics.

History

What is known today as PhysX originated as a physics simulation engine called NovodeX. The engine was developed by

Swiss Swiss most commonly refers to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Swiss may also refer to: Places * Swiss, Missouri * Swiss, North Carolina * Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses * Swiss Café, an old café located ...

company NovodeX AG, an

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

spin-off. In 2004, Ageia acquired NovodeX AG and began developing a hardware technology that could accelerate physics calculations, aiding the CPU. Ageia called the technology PhysX, the SDK was renamed from NovodeX to PhysX, and the accelerator cards were dubbed PPUs (Physics Processing Units). In its implementation, the first video game to use PhysX technology is '' The Stalin Subway'', released in Russia-only game stores in September 2005. In 2008, Ageia was itself acquired by graphics technology manufacturer Nvidia. Nvidia started enabling PhysX

on its line of GeForce

graphics cards A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

and eventually dropped support for Ageia PPUs. PhysX SDK 3.0 was released in May 2011 and represented a significant rewrite of the SDK, bringing improvements such as more efficient multithreading and a unified code base for all supported platforms. At GDC 2015, Nvidia made the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

for PhysX available on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

, but required registration at developer.nvidia.com. The proprietary SDK was provided to developers for free for both commercial and non-commercial use on

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and Android platforms. On December 3, 2018, PhysX was made open source under a 3-clause BSD license, but this change applied only to computer and mobile platforms. On November 8, 2022, the open source release was updated to PhysX 5, under the same 3-clause BSD license. In February 2025, support for 32-bit CUDA applications was deprecated for the GeForce RTX 50 series, rendering GPU-accelerated PhysX nonfunctional in 32-bit titles. This resulted in GPU PhysX options to be processed by the CPU, causing a degradation in performance, in titles such as ''

Mirror's Edge ''Mirror's Edge'' is a 2008 action-adventure platform game developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November 2008, and for Windows in January 2009. Set in a near-future city, i ...

'' and '' Borderlands 2''.

Features

The PhysX engine and SDK are available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux,

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PlayStation 4 The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 in February 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013, in North America, November 29, 2013, in ...

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, Wii, iOS and Android. PhysX is a multi-threaded physics simulation SDK. It supports

rigid body dynamics In the physical science of dynamics, rigid-body dynamics studies the movement of systems of interconnected bodies under the action of external forces. The assumption that the bodies are '' rigid'' (i.e. they do not deform under the action ...

, soft body dynamics (like cloth simulation, including tearing and pressurized cloth), ragdolls and character controllers,

vehicle dynamics Vehicle dynamics is the study of vehicle motion, e.g., how a vehicle's forward movement changes in response to driver inputs, propulsion system outputs, ambient conditions, air/surface/water conditions, etc. Vehicle dynamics is a part of engineer ...

particles In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

and volumetric fluid simulation.

Hardware acceleration

PPU

physics processing unit A physics processing unit (PPU) is a dedicated microprocessor designed to handle the calculations of physics, especially in the physics engine of video games. It is an example of hardware acceleration. Examples of calculations involving a PPU mi ...

(PPU) is a processor specially designed to alleviate the calculation burden on the CPU, specifically calculations involving physics. PhysX PPUs were offered to consumers in the forms of PCI or

PCIe PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...

cards by

ASUS ASUSTeK Computer Inc. (, , , ; stylized as ASUSTeK or ASUS) is a Taiwanese Multinational corporation, multinational computer, phone hardware and electronics manufacturer headquartered in Beitou District, Taipei, Taiwan. Its products include deskto ...

, BFG Technologies,

Dell Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...

and ELSA Technology. Beginning with version 2.8.3 of the PhysX SDK, support for PPU cards was dropped, and PPU cards are no longer manufactured. The last incarnation of PhysX PPU standalone card designed by Ageia had roughly the same PhysX performance as a dedicated 9800GTX.

GPU

After Nvidia's acquisition of Ageia, PhysX development turned away from PPU expansion cards and focused instead on the

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

capabilities of modern GPUs. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for accelerating physical simulations using PhysX. Any

-ready GeForce graphics card (8-series or later GPU with a minimum of 32 cores and a minimum of 256 MB dedicated graphics memory) can take advantage of PhysX without the need to install a dedicated PhysX card.

APEX

Nvidia APEX technology is a multi-platform scalable dynamics framework build around the PhysX SDK. It was first introduced in '' Mafia II'' in August 2010. Nvidia's APEX comprises the following modules: APEX Destruction, APEX Clothing, APEX Particles, APEX Turbulence, APEX ForceField and formerly APEX Vegetation which was suspended in 2011. From version 1.4.1 APEX SDK is deprecated.

Nvidia FleX

FleX is a particle based simulation technique for real-time

visual effects Visual effects (sometimes abbreviated as VFX) is the process by which imagery is created or manipulated outside the context of a live-action shot in filmmaking and video production. The integration of live-action footage and other live-action fo ...

. Traditionally, visual effects are made using a combination of elements created using specialized solvers for rigid bodies, fluids, clothing, etc. Because FleX uses a unified particle representation for all object types, it enables new effects where different simulated substances can interact with each other seamlessly. Such unified physics solvers are a staple of the offline computer graphics world, where tools such as

Autodesk Maya Autodesk Maya, commonly shortened to just Maya (; ), is a 3D computer graphics application that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, originally developed by Alias and currently owned and developed by Autodesk. It is used to create assets for inter ...

's nCloth, and Softimage's Lagoa are widely used. The goal for FleX is to use the power of GPUs to bring the capabilities of these offline applications to real-time computer graphics.

Criticism from Real World Technologies

On July 5, 2010, Real World Technologies published an analysis of the PhysX architecture. According to this analysis, most of the code used in PhysX applications at the time was based on x87 instructions without any multithreading

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criteria, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfiel ...

. This could cause significant performance drops when running PhysX code on the CPU. The article suggested that a PhysX rewrite using SSE instructions may substantially lessen the performance discrepancy between CPU PhysX and GPU PhysX. In response to the Real World Technologies analysis, Mike Skolones, product manager of PhysX, said that SSE support had been left behind because most games are developed for consoles first and then ported to the PC. As a result, modern computers run these games faster and better than the consoles even with little or no optimization. Senior PR manager of Nvidia, Bryan Del Rizzo, explained that multithreading had already been available with CPU PhysX 2.x and that it had been up to the developer to make use of it. He also stated that automatic multithreading and SSE would be introduced with version 3 of the PhysX SDK. PhysX SDK 3.0 was released in May 2011 and represented a significant rewrite of the SDK, bringing improvements such as more efficient multithreading and a unified code base for all supported platforms.

Usage

PhysX in video games

PhysX technology is used by

game engine A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games which generally includes relevant libraries and support programs such as a level editor. The "engine" terminology is akin to the term " software engine" u ...

s such as

Unreal Engine Unreal Engine (UE) is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter video game '' Unreal''. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of ...

(version 3 onwards), Unity, Gamebryo,

Vision Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...

(version 6 onwards), Instinct Engine, Panda3D, Diesel,

Torque In physics and mechanics, torque is the rotational analogue of linear force. It is also referred to as the moment of force (also abbreviated to moment). The symbol for torque is typically \boldsymbol\tau, the lowercase Greek letter ''tau''. Wh ...

, HeroEngine, and BigWorld. As one of the handful of major physics engines, it is used in many games, such as '' The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt'', ''

Warframe ''Warframe'' is a free-to-play action role-playing third-person shooter multiplayer online game developed and published by Digital Extremes. First released for Windows personal computers in March 2013, it was later ported to PlayStation 4 ...

'', '' Killing Floor 2'', '' Batman: Arkham Knight'', '' Planetside 2, ''and '' Borderlands 2''. Most of these games use the CPU to process the physics simulations. Video games with optional support for hardware-accelerated PhysX often include additional effects such as tearable cloth, dynamic smoke or simulated particle debris.

PhysX in other software

Other software with PhysX support includes: * Active Worlds (AW), a 3D virtual reality platform with its client running on Windows *

Amazon Lumberyard Amazon Lumberyard is a now-superseded freeware cross-platform game engine developed by Amazon and based on CryEngine (initially released in 2002), which was licensed from Crytek in 2015. In July 2021, Amazon and the Linux Foundation announced tha ...

, a 3D game development engine developed by

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Autodesk 3ds Max Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max, is a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. It is developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capa ...

and Autodesk Softimage,

computer animation Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating Film, moving images. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both still images and moving images, while computer animation refers to moving images. Virtu ...

suites * DarkBASIC Professional (with DarkPHYSICS upgrade), a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

targeted at game development * DX Studio, an integrated development environment for creating interactive 3D graphics * ForgeLight, a game engine developed by the former

Sony Online Entertainment Daybreak Game Company LLC is an American video game developer based in San Diego. The company was founded in December 1997 as Sony Online Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, but was spun off to an independent investor in ...

. * Futuremark's 3DMark06 and Vantage benchmarking tools * Microsoft Robotics Studio, an environment for robot control and simulation *

's SuperSonic Sled and Raging Rapids Ride, technology demos *

OGRE An ogre (feminine: ogress) is a legendary monster depicted as a large, hideous, man-like being that eats ordinary human beings, especially infants and children. Ogres frequently feature in mythology, folklore, and fiction throughout the world ...

(via the NxOgre wrapper), an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

rendering engine *The Physics Abstraction Layer, a physical simulation

abstraction system (it provides COLLADA and Scythe Physics Editor support for PhysX) *Rayfire, a plug-in for

that allows fracturing and other physics simulations *The Physics Engine Evaluation Lab, a tool designed to evaluate, compare and benchmark physics engines. *

game development software by

Epic Games Epic Games, Inc. is an American Video game developer, video game and software development, software developer and video game publisher, publisher based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney (game developer), Tim Sween ...

. Unreal Engine 4.26 and onwards has officially deprecated PhysX. * Unity by Unity ApS. Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack does not use PhysX.

References

External links

Official Product SiteTechgage: AGEIA PhysX.. First ImpressionsTechgage: NVIDIA's PhysX: Performance and Status Report
{{DEFAULTSORT:Physx Computer physics engines MacOS programming tools Nvidia software PlayStation 3 software PlayStation 4 software Programming tools for Windows Science software for Linux Science software for macOS Science software for Windows Software using the BSD license Video game development software for Linux Video game development Virtual reality Wii software Xbox 360 software