Gaming

I've Tested Physx Now That It's Sorta Supported On The Rtx 50...

2025-12-12 0 views admin

I did not expect to be talking about PhysX in 2025. The technology came out when I was still in school and today I'm at an age where buying a motor vehicle could be described as a midlife crisis. No, PhysX hasn't been relevant for a while. Or so I thought…

Earlier this year, Nvidia pulled support for 32-bit CUDA applications with its newest generation graphics cards, the RTX 50 series. With it gone, it's no longer possible to natively run 32-bit games with hardware-accelerated PhysX effects.

Why that matters: PhysX offers a way to run some in-game physics calculations on an add-in card. That not only frees up the CPU to focus on other things, it also allows developers to put a lot more physics-based effects into their games. As such, games with PhysX effects tend to have a lot of stuff going on.

If you run a game with PhysX enabled but without the hardware to accelerate it then all of the physics calculations fall on your CPU. Even on today's much faster processors, with many more cores than those around during PhysX's peak, the impact of these added effects severely limits frame rate. The CPU becomes a bottleneck. Or you turn PhysX off.

Now, I'll admit, I hadn't thought about PhysX for a long time, let alone thought to retest it. But earlier this week, fresh on the heels of Nvidia adding support for select PhysX titles on RTX 50-series cards, I decided to do just that.

Now, I had originally thought turning PhysX off to be a simple solution to the problem. However, after testing it myself, I realise why so many simply refused to do just that. I've tested both Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, and in both, I've been surprised by how much just vanishes for disabling PhysX. Objects, fog, smoke, flags and particle effects of all kinds just disappear, and even character models change, often making the game appear as flat as a pancake.

From my figures below, you get a good idea of the sort of performance impact a lack of PhysX acceleration means for some of these older games. My test system remained the same between runs, it's only the graphics card that changed. I also unlocked the frame rate via the config files.

There's a large reduction in performance when enabling PhysX on the RTX 50-series ca

Source: PC Gamer