Nvidia Broke PhysX in Lots of Old Games, But Only for GeForce RTX 50-Series GPUs

The GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have lost support for the PhysX physics engine in 32-bit games, and Nvidia doesn’t seem to be fixing it. When running the still-popular Borderlands 2 on an RTX 50 card, the PhysX engine uses the CPU instead of the GPU, causing performance issues. Nvidia called this “expected behavior” because it dropped PhysX support in older games.

Image source: NVIDIA

With the launch of the GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, Nvidia has dropped support for 32-bit CUDA applications, including 32-bit games that use the PhysX engine. This will affect games like Borderlands 2, Batman: Arkham City, BioShock Infinite, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and more. At the same time, 64-bit games that use PhysX will continue to run normally on GeForce RTX 50-series cards.

Nvidia’s decision to stop supporting PhysX in 32-bit games doesn’t mean they won’t work on the company’s latest chips — games will run with the physics engine disabled or use the CPU to run PhysX, which significantly reduces the speed of in-game physics calculations and the realism of the environment. RTX 40-series and older GPUs will continue to support 32-bit applications in full.

Below is the text of Nvidia’s official statement:

32-bit native compilation and cross-compilation have been removed from CUDA Toolkit 12.0 and later. 32-bit CUDA applications cannot be developed or debugged using CUDA Toolkit 12.0 or later for any target architecture. Use CUDA Toolkit from earlier releases for 32-bit compilation.

The CUDA driver will continue to support running 32-bit application binaries on GeForce RTX 40 series (Ada), GeForce RTX 30 series (Ampere), GeForce RTX 20/GTX 16 series (Turing), GeForce GTX 10 series (Pascal), and GeForce GTX 9 series (Maxwell) GPUs. The CUDA driver will not support 32-bit CUDA applications on GeForce RTX 50 series (Blackwell) and newer architectures.

Support for running 32-bit x86 applications on x86_64 Windows is limited to using:

• CUDA Drivers
• CUDA Runtimes (cudart)
• CUDA Mathematical Library (math.h)

It is unlikely that Nvidia will restore the functionality of 32-bit CUDA code on the GeForce RTX 5000 series of graphics accelerators. Numerous comments from experts and ordinary users call such a policy “disrespectful to Nvidia’s gaming heritage”, of which PhysX is a part.