this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Yeah, and a great post too - because some of your points here just point out that everyone ELSE have deprecated PhysX as well. Unity and Unreal both dropped it long ago. It's basically a moot point for 99.9% of people playing games.
Instead of using a PPU on the GPU, most people have focused on GPGPU physics calculations instead. The idea behind PhysX was a difficult one to launch in the first place. Given that most chip real-estate is going to these VPUs, I'm not surprised at all that they ditched the PPU for a more generalized version.
well, sorta. some engines like unreal have indeed dropped physx (in fact that's the only one that's in there as having dropped it), but there are some heavy hitters in there. unity did not drop it as far as i know, but they have a separate version without it that's not made for games.
i also happen to know that ARMA 3, which is not on the list, is a heavy physx user. so i don't know how accurate any of our lists actually are.
my takeaway from this list is that if nvidia follows suit with their AX series and other pro cards, they are going to lose significant market share with the CAD and CFD crowd, because those guys have 40 year old codebases and they are not going to be happy that they have to rewrite a subsystem.
PhysX has just been a CUDA application for a long time, there's not been a dedicated PPU on any card in a very long time
I don't think there has ever been a PPU on the GPU. It did originally run on PPU cards by Ageia, but AFAIK PhysX on GPU:s used CUDA GPGPU right from the start.