Monday, December 3rd 2018
NVIDIA PhysX Now Open-Source
NVIDIA PhysX, the most popular physics simulation engine on the planet, is going open source. We're doing this because physics simulation - long key to immersive games and entertainment - turns out to be more important than we ever thought. Physics simulation dovetails with AI, robotics and computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and high-performance computing.
It's foundational for so many different things we've decided to provide it to the world in an open source fashion. Meanwhile, we're building on more than a decade of continuous investment in this area to simulate the world with ever greater fidelity, with on-going research and development to meet the needs of those working in robotics and with autonomous vehicles.
Full Source on GitHub.
Free, Open-Source, GPU-Accelerated
PhysX will now be the only free, open-source physics solution that takes advantage of GPU acceleration and can handle large virtual environments. It will be available as open source starting Monday, Dec. 3, under the simple BSD-3 license. PhysX solves some serious challenges.
PhysX SDK addresses these challenges with scalable, stable and accurate simulations. It's widely compatible, and it's now open source. PhysX SDK is a scalable multi-platform game physics solution supporting a wide range of devices, from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs. It's already integrated into some of the most popular game engines, including Unreal Engine (versions 3 and 4) and Unity3D.
You can also find the full source code on GitHub. Dig in.
It's foundational for so many different things we've decided to provide it to the world in an open source fashion. Meanwhile, we're building on more than a decade of continuous investment in this area to simulate the world with ever greater fidelity, with on-going research and development to meet the needs of those working in robotics and with autonomous vehicles.
Free, Open-Source, GPU-Accelerated
PhysX will now be the only free, open-source physics solution that takes advantage of GPU acceleration and can handle large virtual environments. It will be available as open source starting Monday, Dec. 3, under the simple BSD-3 license. PhysX solves some serious challenges.
- In AI, researchers need synthetic data - artificial representations of the real world - to train data-hungry neural networks.
- In robotics, researchers need to train robotic minds in environments that work like the real one.
- For self-driving cars, PhysX allows vehicles to drive for millions of miles in simulators that duplicate real-world conditions.
- In game development, canned animation doesn't look organic and is time consuming to produce at a polished level.
- In high-performance computing, physics simulations are being done on ever more powerful machines with ever greater levels of fidelity.
PhysX SDK addresses these challenges with scalable, stable and accurate simulations. It's widely compatible, and it's now open source. PhysX SDK is a scalable multi-platform game physics solution supporting a wide range of devices, from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs. It's already integrated into some of the most popular game engines, including Unreal Engine (versions 3 and 4) and Unity3D.
You can also find the full source code on GitHub. Dig in.
53 Comments on NVIDIA PhysX Now Open-Source
I hope someone makes a wrapper that intercepts PhysX calls to the GPU, and sends them to the CPU instead. Hell, it would probably run much better on modern high core count CPUs anyway, as well as freeing up precious GPU resources.
This should be embraced at any rate, as now AMD cards can do PhysX if they chose to implement it. You no longer have only NVIDIA to blame for the propietary nature of it as they just did away with that. You'd think that'd be a good thing.Hardly. Even if you have an AMD GPU chances are some games were running this on CPU. No matter how many times you utter it, it simple wasn't dead.
physxinfo.com/index.php?p=gam&f=relIf they believed open sourcing this was going to cost them money, they wouldn't have done it, period. There is no obligation to do anything like that unless it is profitable. By opensourcing it they are probably ensuring wider adoption and they believe the good PR will generate more profits than PhysX was making.
We all know that compute has always been AMD's strong point, and I guess nGreedia may have ended up looking bad if they had have given AMD the keys to the little black box.
Now they can support PhysX thanks to their overwhelming love of open source it is only a matter of time before they add support to their drivers.
Let's all count the days before they add support.
For the record, I'm pro Wallet myself. I couldn't care less about AMD or nGreedia, unless they are raping my wallet or causing harm to my hobby, and one of those two companies is.
I'll go dry my tears with tissues from the real world, it looks quite different to when you could last see clearly.
Stay on topic.
Stop the bickering, name calling and insults. (You know who you are.)
Thank You, Have a Nice Day!
So for gpu physics:
physX: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_hardware-accelerated_PhysX_support
Havok FX: 0(one nvidia demo on year 2005 or so and one amd demo somewhere 2009)
Bullet: Er something, can't remember what but more than Havok FX...
For cpu physics:
Havok: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_using_Havok
PhysX: physxinfo.com/index.php?p=gam&f=cpu
Here, I'll give you a hand and reproduce it in full, unedited form:The core of the BSD license is to allow any and all modifications to be done with the IP, as long as you distribute your modified IP with said license in it, with the right copyright attributions.
Then there's this little problem:Yes, probably, because it will prohibit third-party versions of PhsyX running on systems with NVIDIA GPUs. A universal solution, ergo, won't work well on NVIDIA GPUs unless they change their practice. A third party won't be able to sign installers to replace PhysX unless you forcibly remove PhsyX from the system and mimic it with new PhysX libraries. It's honestly a trainwreck--backwards compatibility is a problem unless NVIDIA jumps on the open-source bandwagon or uninvolves itself letting the open-source version take over.