Earlier this week, Nvidia confirmed in its official forums that “32-bit CUDA applications are deprecated on GeForce RTX 50 series GPUS.” The company’s support page for its “Support plan for 32-bit CUDA” notes that some 32-bit capabilities were removed from CUDA 12.0 but does not mention PhysX. Effectively, the 50 series cards cannot run any game with PhysX as developers originally intended. That’s ironic, considering Nvidia originally pushed this tech back in the early 2010s to sell its GTX range of GPUs.
PhysX is a GPU-accelerated physics system that allows for more realistic physics simulations in games without putting pressure on the CPU. This included small particle effects like fog or smoke and cloth movement.
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a game like Batman: Arkham City […] with an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti, and when you try to enable hardware-accelerated physics in settings, you’ll receive a note reading, “Your hardware does not support Nvidia Hardware Accelerated PhysX. Performance will be reduced without dedicated hardware.” [ …] The in-game benchmark shows that with the hardware accelerated physics setting enabled on the RTX 5070 Ti, I saw a hit of 65 average FPS compared to the setting off, from 164 to 99. The difference in ambiance without the setting enabled is striking.
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In other games, like Borderlands 2, it simply grays out the PhysX option in settings. As one Reddit user found, you can force it through editing the game files, but that will result in horrible framerate drops even when shooting a gun at a wall. It’s not what the game makers intended. If you want to play these older games in their prime, your best option is to plug a separate, older GeForce GPU into the system and run 32-bit PhysX games exclusively on that card.
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we see Nvidia deprecating its own hardware capabilities, hurting games that are little more than a decade old
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Source: Nvidia Drops Support for PhysX on Its RTX 50-Series Cards
Robin Edgar
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