NVIDIA Makes PhysX Open-Source

[Tomin]

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

That's a good one.

And now I'm unsubscribing.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Filiprino]

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

[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.

[Zeioth]

And it only took them a decade. Cool.

[schmidtbag]

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.

More like "we're doing this because we spent all this money on a technology where the only real benefit came from people buying our stuff, and as a result, completely lost everyone's interest. But, we're not interested in putting in the effort to support non-Nvidia hardware".
Although locking down PhysX to only Nvidia hardware definitely didn't help its success, I actually don't think that's what led to its unpopularity. As far as I'm concerned, Nvidia made 2 big mistakes with PhysX:
1. The drivers were bloated, and even if you wanted to do AMD for primary graphics and Nvidia for PhysX, getting the drivers installed properly was a headache.
2. Software had to explicitly support GPU-accelerated PhysX. So, even if you had a PhysX-ready system, there was a lot of PhysX-enabled software that wasn't GPU accelerated. So at that point, why not just use a competitor like Havok?

[tuke81]

This is nice. Hopefully now we can:

a) Make the cpu-based physx implementation support more threads and better instruction sets, instead of being locked into 1 core and only x87

b) port it to OpenCL, so it can run on non-Nvidia hardware...

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

[L_A_G]

It would be nice if someone took this and went ahead and created a vendor-neutral GPU implementation using OpenCL or Vulkan.

However knowing Nvidia I doubt they'll be accepting any outside code contributions and particularly not ones that mess with their vendor lock-in. It'll just be their main branch and a bunch of disorganized branches, most of them closed source, maintained by individual companies for their own internal use.