Nvidia has made the PhysX SDK, the physics simulation engine PhysX, and the fluid simulation library Flow completely open source. The PhysX SDK code has been published on GitHub for several years under a BSD license, but without the simulation core code. This has now been fixed.
Image source: videocardz.com
«“We are excited to announce that the latest PhysX SDK update now includes the entire GPU source code, fully licensed under BSD-3! There are over 500 ready-to-use CUDA cores available, enabling features such as rigid body dynamics, fluid simulation, and deformable objects. GPU PhysX represents one of the most advanced examples of using CUDA and the GPU for online simulation. We hope this release will be a valuable resource for the entire community to learn, experiment, and build on. Additionally, we have made a full GPU compute shader implementation available for the Flow SDK, our fluid simulation library,” NVIDIA said in a statement.
PhysX is back in the spotlight after it was recently revealed that some games running on PCs with Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards perform better with older software. This is because Nvidia’s latest generation of graphics cards do not support the 32-bit PhysX library. Having access to the PhysX code will likely give enthusiasts the opportunity to try and fix the issue themselves, as Nvidia doesn’t appear to have any plans to do so.