NVIDIA PhysX is going open source. NVIDIA is doing this because physics simulation - long key to immersive games and entertainment - turns out to be more important than we ever thought. Physics simula... NVIDIA PhysX Engine Now is Open-Source
Cool, now I can get rid of my GT1030 (GDDR5) for those few Physx games (Batman games, Borderlands 1 and 2. Can't think of any recent game with it).
How exactly were they milking customers with it when the SDK & platform has always been free? Also the source has been available since 2015 via their github - the only difference here is that it's now available via an open license...
@ManofGod This is very likely indeed. It is also possible that other physic engine solutions are used by modern video game titles and upcoming games, so they want to try out if some developers get interested in PhysX again, so any software using PhysX would run smoother on their hardware. This logic also applies on the other mentioned usecases, so Nvidia's hardware would be used in all situations to make PhysX run without major performance penalty or to have easier time when programming PhysX to work with the hardware. The reason for this whole move is to sell their hardware.
The source has been available for three years... What does this have to do with the software always being free and source being available for three years? lol.. Anyone can write an OpenCompute physics middleware and publish it. Nvidia isn't controlling that. PhysX is the default physics implementation in Unity & Unreal. It's by far the most popular physics engine. They are releasing 4.0 SDK soon and it seems like the choice to move it to an open license coincides with that. You're kind of right about the hardware though as one of the mean features is BVH support for fast queries - BVH performance is one of the major changes in Turing architecture as part of the RT core. So yeah I think it's about renewing interest in the new SDK but in reality there isn't much going on here that wasn't already available.
@Denial Did you mean OpenCL/DirectCompute? Anyway, it is not like anyone sane expects any PhysX game to be working well on any platform.
i can go on about this open source code being released later than earlier, but 1) it's obvious, and 2) it's a good thing regardless. kudos to Nvidia
haha Sounds like a last-ditch effort to save PhysX. But now we'll probably have even more unstable games with it!