NVIDIA PhysX SKD 5.1 open-sourced

A few hours ago, NVIDIA open-sourced their PhysX SDK 5.1 with Some 662k lines of code out there…

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Wow, that’s actually good news and unexpected from nvidia (they very rarely open source something, tbh i dint recall anything open sourced from them recently).

Is this license compatible with GPL? As far as i understand its almost CC-BY.
They only require “Copyright (c) 2008-2022 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved.”

Looks like a standard MIT licence to me. So yes, it is GPL compatible.

I believe they started open sourcing linux GPU kernel modules under a joint MIT/GPL v2 licence a few months ago as well.

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I hope the UPBGE guys (and the Blender devs.) have a path away from Bullet Physics because I can see it going EOL now (at least as a general-purpose engine). By Nvidia’s announcement, that path looks to be them integrating PhysX and helping in its development.

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Yes, Nvidia physics is way more performant and stable with more features also.
And production prooven in so many triple A games.
While Unreal and Unity proposing other options than only Physix with Chaos physics or Havoc as a paid option.

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Currently CPU compatible… If I got it right, GPU binaries are closed source and they don’t plan to make the GPU features open source . I think that’s kind of a turn off for most developers unfortunately.

Good news, CEB Studios is already starting working on it :slight_smile:

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That would just be for the baking of the simulation right? I don’t know if I would mind that and then do the render on the GPU.

Yes and No, Physx is a realtime engine. Which means its designed in a way where you can have physics simulation on the go no baking, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B08SOs8YZ4 This is an example of physx in use. But for artist maybe having baking might give more creative control, that can be an extra, So Physx out of the box Is not meant for baking, just like how we have Raytracing which is meant to be real time. And i hope it remains the same, as caching like in bullet is extremely poor performant.

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