▷ What is nvidia physx and what is it for

Nvidia PhysX is an advanced and powerful engine that enables real-time physics in the most advanced PC games. PhysX software is currently widely adopted by more than 150 games and is used by more than 10, 000 developers, which gives us an idea of ​​its great importance.

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Everything you need to know about Nvidia Physx technology

PhysX is a proprietary real-time physics engine SDK. PhysX was created on NovodeX, a spin-off from ETH Zurich. In 2004, NovodeX was acquired by Ageia, and in February 2008 Ageia was acquired by Nvidia, the world's leading graphics card manufacturer. The term PhysX can also refer to the PPU expansion card designed by Ageia to accelerate PhysX-enabled video games.

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What is known today as PhysX originated as a physics simulation engine called NovodeX. The multithreaded motor was developed by the Swiss company NovodeX AG. In 2004 Ageia acquired NovodeX AG and began developing a hardware technology that could speed up physical calculations by helping the CPU. Ageia called the PhysX PPU (Physics Processing Unit) technology, and the SDK was renamed PhysX as NovodeX. In 2008 Ageia was acquired by graphics technology manufacturer Nvidia. Subsequently Nvidia began enabling PhysX hardware acceleration on its GeForce line of graphics cards, and eventually ceased to be compatible with Ageia's PPUs.

PhysX is a technology that is optimized for hardware physics acceleration using massively parallel processors. Nvidia GeForce GPUs with PhysX support provide an exponential increase in the processing power of physics, taking gaming physics to the next level.

The multiprocess PhysX engine was specifically designed for hardware acceleration in massively parallel environments. GPUs are the natural place to calculate physics calculations because, like graphics, physics processing relies on thousands of parallel calculations. Today, Nvidia's GPUs have up to 5, 000+ core cores, making them suitable for leveraging PhysX software. The combination of graphics and physics affects the appearance and behavior of a virtual world.

Nvidia PhysX makes games more alive than ever

Physics is about how the objects in your game move, interact, and react to the environment around them. Without physics in many of today's games, objects just don't seem to act the way you want or expect in real life. Currently, most of the action is limited to pre-defined animations triggered by in-game events, such as a wall shot. Even the most powerful weapons can leave little more than a stain on the thinnest part of the walls, and each opponent you kill falls in the same predetermined way. Players are left with a game that looks good, but lacks the sense of realism necessary to make the experience truly immersive.

With Nvidia PhysX technology, the game worlds literally come to life: walls can tear down, glass can shatter, trees bend in the wind, and water flows with force and body. Nvidia GeForce GPUs with PhysX offer the computing power necessary to enable true and advanced physics in the next generation of titles, making predefined animation effects a thing of the past.

Requirements to use PhysX

The minimum requirement to support PhysX is a GeForce 8 Series or later graphics card with a minimum of 32 cores and a minimum of 256 MB of dedicated graphics memory. Overall, though, 512MB of graphics memory is recommended unless you have a dedicated PhysX GPU. When two, three, or four Nvidia GPUs are working on SLI, PhysX runs on one GPU, while graphics rendering runs on all GPUs. NVIDIA drivers optimize the resources available on all GPUs to balance PhysX computation and graphics rendering. Therefore, users can expect much higher frame rates and a better overall SLI experience.

PhysX is currently possible with 2 heterogeneous GPUs. In this configuration, one GPU renders graphics, usually the most powerful, while the second GPU is entirely dedicated to PhysX calculations. By downloading all the PhysX calculations to a dedicated GPU, users will experience smoother gaming.

This ends our article on what Nvidia Physx is, we hope that it has been useful for you and has helped you to solve all your doubts about this advanced and important technology used in the most modern video games.