Remember PhysX, the GPU-accelerated technology that let games realistically simulate destructible cloth, shattering glass, moving liquids, smoke, fog, and other particle effects? It only ever got deployed in a few dozen games — but with 32-bit PhysX turned on, those games reportedly now run faster on Nvidia’s last-gen cards than they do on a new RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti or beyond.
That’s because Nvidia has quietly removed support for PhysX in its latest graphics chips, the company confirmed this week, after buyers noticed PhysX games like Borderlands 2 were mysteriously taxing their CPU instead of their GPU and either chugging or failing to work. Nvidia points to a support page from January where it did say that the RTX 50 series would not support 32-bit CUDA applications, but that page doesn’t explicitly mention PhysX, and the company’s other PhysX support pages are several years old.
Again, we’re talking about mere dozens of games here, all over a decade old, but a good number of them were marketed by Nvidia as showcase PC games thanks to their physics simulations — and a handful of those were at least cult hits.
I fondly remember PhysX cloth effects in Mirror’s Edge (above) and the Batman: Arkham games. The best Assassin’s Creed also used it (Black Flag, the pirate one, don’t @ me) and so did Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light.
And as you can see in the video just above, PhysX just doesn’t run terribly well without a GPU’s assistance, tanking performance when its effects are most vividly felt on screen.
One Redditor claims that when they forced PhysX on in Borderlands 2, they “got drops to below 60 FPS by just standing and shooting a shock gun at a wall,” despite having a system with today’s top PC components (an RTX 5090 and an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D). They claim their RTX 4090 never dipped below 120fps in the same game.
I won’t terribly miss PhysX, because modern games have plenty of other ways to do physics built into their various engines, but Nvidia could probably have communicated this better. It’s also just the latest evidence that its RTX 50-series cards aren’t the upgrades we’d hoped. My colleague Tom reviewed the new RTX 5070 Ti today, and found it’s largely a cheaper RTX 4080, except maybe not cheaper because you probably won’t be able to find one anywhere near its $750 sticker price.
Nvidia’s older cards don’t seem to be losing value as a result of this year’s upgrades, either: the street price of an RTX 4080 has actually jumped over the past month, from an average eBay selling price of around $1,000 in January to over $1,200 now.
