News Announcing PhysX SDK 4.0, an Open-Source Physics Engine

lashman

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Announcing PhysX SDK 4.0, an Open-Source Physics Engine - NVIDIA Developer News Center


NVIDIA is proud to announce PhysX SDK 4.0, available on December 20, 2018. The engine has been upgraded to provide industrial grade simulation quality at game simulation performance. In addition, PhysX SDK has gone open source, starting today with version 3.4! It is available under the simple 3-Clause BSD license. With access to the source code, developers can debug, customize and extend the PhysX

New features:


  • Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS), which makes machinery, characters/ragdolls, and anything else that is jointed or articulated much more robust. TGS dynamically re-computes constraints with each iteration, based on bodies’ relative motion.
  • Overall stability has been improved with reduced coordinate articulations and joint improvements.
  • Increased scalability via new filtering rules for kinematics and statics.
  • New Bounding Volume Hierarchies support fast scene queries for actors with a huge number of shapes.
  • Infrastructure can now incorporate Cmake projects.

BSD 3 licensed platforms:


  • Apple iOS
  • Apple Mac OS X
  • Google Android ARM (version 2.2 or later required for SDK, 2.3 or later required for snippets)
  • Linux (tested on Ubuntu)
  • Microsoft Windows XP or later (NVIDIA Driver version R304 or later is required for GPU acceleration)

Unchanged NVIDIA EULA platforms:


  • Microsoft XBox One
  • Sony Playstation 4
  • Nintendo Switch

PhysX has been the market leader in physics simulations for more than a decade. The SDK holds the top spot due to continuous upgrades and optimizations; NVIDIA has ensured that PhysX is always ahead of the curve, enabling developers to deliver
state-of-the-art physics simulations.
 

freshVeggie

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Looks very nice. Love me some sweet game physics.
I for one, welcome our new digital robot overlords!


Didn't know PhysX now also does AI. It looks awesome how it learns proper walking and problem-solving.
Would be cool if these features got adopted into Unity.
 
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lashman

lashman

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Looks very nice. Love me some sweet game physics.
I for one, welcome our new digital robot overlords!



Didn't know PhysX now also does AI. It looks awesome how it learns proper walking and problem-solving.
Would be cool if these features got adopted into Unity.
yeah, it's awesome ... would be nice if more devs started adding physx stuff to their games ....

unfortunately it's not going to happen even now since it's not open-source on consoles :( shame
 
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madjoki

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Maybe AMD can now optimise it better.

yeah, it's awesome ... would be nice if more devs started adding physx stuff to their games ....

unfortunately it's not going to happen even now since it's not open-source on consoles :( shame
This is can be due to console manufacturers right? (ie. has dependencies on console SDK).
 
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lashman

lashman

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Maybe AMD can now optimise it better.
or, like, AT ALL :p would be nice

This is can be due to console manufacturers right? (ie. has dependencies on console SDK).
yeah, probably ... doubt they're doing this just to be dicks to console manufacturers .... but then again - this IS nvidia, so ....
 
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lashman

lashman

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This is great news.

I dunno about first-party titles, but I swear I've seen plenty of PhysX logos on third-party console games?
might be because Unity (for sure) and UE4 (i think) both use PhysX for ... well ... physics :p
 
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「Echo」

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Mt. Whatever
might be because Unity (for sure) and UE4 (i think) both use PhysX for ... well ... physics :p
Ah! I suppose that makes sense. It really does stink that so many of these advanced technologies have a hard time becoming mainstream if the consoles don't adapt them. >_>

This is my big fear for Nvidia's RTX stuff, and even ray-tracing in general, given that we know the next=gen consoles will use AMD hardware and AMD has basically said "no" to Hardware assisted ray-tracing.
 
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lashman

lashman

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It really does stink that so many of these advanced technologies have a hard time becoming mainstream if the consoles don't adapt them. >_>
yeah, you have no idea! i was sooooo hoping physx would eventually get more use in games ... but that never happened :( pretty much only Arkham games made any real use of that stuff .... i even liked the shitty blobby blood in Blands 2 and Alice

This is my big fear for Nvidia's RTX stuff, and even ray-tracing in general, given that we know the next=gen consoles will use AMD hardware and AMD has basically said "no" to Hardware assisted ray-tracing.
nah, raytracing should be fine ... obviously there's like ZERO chance it'll be in the next-gen consoles (maaaaaybe next-next-gen) ... but on the technical side - it's a DirectX thing, so MS handles that .... nvidia only provides the tech side .... so if AMD decides to support DXR - it'll work just fine :)

so there's that
 
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