Technology always marches forward, but often there are a couple of hobbled lurches backwards at the same time. One of them appears to be Nvidia PhysX, a proprietary graphics technology that was all the rage about 20 years ago but has since fallen out of fashion. The system has been stealthily retired for the new RTX 50-series cards, leaving some old but beloved games in an awkward position.
For the uninitiated, PhysX is a system that adds physics effects to games with some dedicated acceleration tech. We’ve seen it in some very specific but very visible graphical examples, like dripping liquids, blowing hair, or hanging cloth. It was used in a lot of the biggest PC games from 2005 to 2013 or so, like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Borderlands 2.
While you can use the PhysX system on almost any hardware, including running it solely on your CPU, Nvidia’s GPUs had dedicated hardware to run it smoothly without performance problems. You could even use a secondary, older graphics card for dedicated PhysX processing.
PhysX isn’t especially useful in modern games, though, because modern game engines can simulate these effects more efficiently and without needing specific SDKs. For example, Batman: Arkham Knight was a huge graphical upgrade that didn’t use PhysX in the PC version like its predecessors did. Unreal 5 doesn’t even support it! So it makes sense that Nvidia didn’t pay too much attention to it in the newest GPUs, which lack the 32-bit CUDA hardware it was originally designed for.
But that still leaves a lot of old and beloved games in a bit of a pickle. A ResetEra forum poster (spotted by PCGamesN) put together a list of the major games from that era that used GPU-accelerated PhysX and are going to be struggling to strut their best graphical stuff on the RTX 50 series. Notable titles include the original Mirror’s Edge, Unreal Tournament 3, Batman: Arkham Asylum/City/Origins, Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
None of these games absolutely need PhysX to run, but trying to use the PhysX system for these dedicated effects on a new Nvidia GPU — or dedicating that slice of performance to the CPU — will result in a dramatic reduction in frame rates. For example, an RTX 5090 running Borderlands 2 with all the bells and whistles turned on will perform notably worse than an RTX 4090 running the same settings.
Personally, I don’t think this is the “stop the presses” emergency that some YouTube gamerbros are treating this as. PhysX effects were never essential to the games they were featured in. (Most of those games were also released on consoles, which didn’t have any PhysX support.) And old games are always at risk of running into issues on newer hardware. It’s just a fact of life. Try booting up the original release version of Skyrim from 2011 on a modern PC if you don’t believe me.
That said, this is indicative of a certain lack of concern for preservation on Nvidia’s part — and the preservation of video games is becoming a bigger problem as the medium ages and becomes more focused on software than hardware.
