NVIDIA Makes PhysX Open-Source

[Zeioth]

And it only took them a decade. Cool.

[Hadrian]

Phoronix wrote:
"While NVIDIA is often thought of by Linux enthusiasts/gamers as being open-source un-friendly, …"

Oh, they still are open-source un-friendly, see their nasty graphics cards' blobs.

Or like Linus Torvalds put it: "Hug Nvidia!" (*)

(*) Original words from Linus castrated to a politically correct but distorting-the-meaning version by the new Code of Madness.

[Filiprino]

Now that PhysX is dead in the market they were targeting first at, they release the code.
Hah.

[LeJimster]

Its nice, but they killed PhysX off as a proper part of games by going closed source. Game devs can't build a game around it knowing it only works on some hardware. So its implementation has been as an extra.. Novelty, just like hair works is now and probably RTX stuff going forward.

what they should do is keep it closed source a year or two then opensource it. That way they maintain an advantage but the tech becomes more widespread. Otherwise its just dead in the water as a mainstream feature.

[tuke81]

Now that PhysX is dead in the market they were targeting first at, they release the code.
Hah.

Unreal 4 and unity 5 engines both have cpu PhysX engine build in, maybe they will add GPU physX engine too now that it's open source. But yeah I agree restricting GPU PhysX to cuda only and even forcing to nvidia gpu for non-physics stuff too in the past were the most idiotic things and it really made wide adoption of gpu-physx impossible. Now make gpu physX with Vulkan/OpenCL and we have the winner. BTW. Havok has been Microsofts since 2015 and I don't believe that would be viable choice for linux gaming.

[tildearrow]

That may have been the case. I also seem to recall that if you wanted the latest version with all it's bells and whistles then you still had to opt for a closed source PhysX.

NVIDIA always does this when contributing to open-source/Linux. They say they contribute, but there always is one thing wrong:

- Every time they release signed firmware, they never release the bits for reclocking.

- When they said they were going to support the Wayland ecosystem they implemented DRM and KMS, but not GBM. However, they came with their very own EGLSlowtreams solution.

- When they worked on PRIME support, it wasn't for GPU offloading (AKA Optimus), and they are not willing to support doing so.

[Tomin]

Or like Linus Torvalds put it: "Hug Nvidia!"

That's a good one.

And now I'm unsubscribing.

[uxmkt]

And nobody tested this. First thing that happens is that a gcc8 linux64 build dies at some point because of -Werror.

[ksec]

Unreal 4 and unity 5 engines both have cpu PhysX engine build in, maybe they will add GPU physX engine too now that it's open source. But yeah I agree restricting GPU PhysX to cuda only and even forcing to nvidia gpu for non-physics stuff too in the past were the most idiotic things and it really made wide adoption of gpu-physx impossible. Now make gpu physX with Vulkan/OpenCL and we have the winner. BTW. Havok has been Microsofts since 2015 and I don't believe that would be viable choice for linux gaming.

Since this is BSD, what are the chances PhysX made it into newer Unreal and Unity?

[TemplarGR]

Point a) has been multithreaded and using sse since physX 3...

Didn't know about that. Still, it could use AVX(2)....