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NVIDIA have now made PhysX open source

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Popping up a little while ago on Twitter, NVIDIA has announced that they've now put PhysX under an open source license.

Something I am sure many game developers and the open source community will approve of. Writing about it on their official blog, NVIDIA said "We’re doing this because physics simulation — long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought.".

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Originally from NovodeX, which was later acquired by Ageia and then in 2008 Ageia itself was acquired by NVIDIA. Instead of focusing on a dedicated expansion card, NVIDIA decided to work with it together with their own GPUs.

You can find it on GitHub under the BSD-3 license. It's good to see NVIDIA do more like this.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Shmerl Dec 4, 2018
Quoting: HoriCorrect me if I'm wrong but WINE games cannot use Physx, right?

PhysX can run on the CPU.
ElectricPrism Dec 4, 2018
I guess their angle is PhysX is no longer a chess piece with much strategic value to fortify their dominant hold so open sourcing it is their fallback strategy in the hopes of it increasing their PR?

Or perhaps they hope it lingers making games perform better on Nvidia cards and worse on others if the design can't be adapted for multi-GPU fair use easily.

I'm the cynacist optimist, while this is good news it will take open sourcing a few more nvidia technologies before my handgun stops smoking and I set it down.

I wonder if Nvidia is nervous about Intel entering the dGPU market and freaking out internally some. Both AMD and Intel are in the lead gaining open source favour. Nvidia is behind and could easily loose relevance in a few years time under the right conditions.
soulsource Dec 4, 2018
Quoting: Stebs
Quoting: soulsourceNevertheless, I just recently installed it via the unofficial Gentoo ebuilds, and I must say, that it indeed ROCks.
Just got me a RX 580 and was sad to learn that I can't use ROCm because ... they think my i7 2600k Sandy Bridge is too old!
So OpenCL on my GPU does not work because of my CPU
That leaves me with Clover and OpenCL 1.1, worse than with my old Nvidia Card before, not exactly what I was expecting...

To be fair, it's not that they "think" it's too old, it lacks a feature required by ROCm on older GPUs. If it were a Vega GPU, it would work with that CPU ( https://rocm.github.io/ROCmInstall.html#supported-cpus ).

Probably it would be possible to work around that lacking feature though. I guess that they simply don't have a budget for that...


Last edited by soulsource on 4 December 2018 at 6:51 am UTC
Nanobang Dec 4, 2018
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I think a heartfelt "holy shit!" is appropriate here.
Iperpido Dec 5, 2018
:O
slaapliedje Dec 5, 2018
Just tried Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2, one of the games I know directly support PhysX. It doesn't actually work under Proton. Well the game does, the PhysX portion does not.
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