If you are the owner of an NVIDIA graphics card, you have surely seen that when installing the drivers, the word PhysX appears somewhere. In fact, we are faced with a engine considerate owner middleware really very powerful, and which in the past was on everyone’s lips because it was the one that allowed real-time physics in games of pc. However, does it still make sense in mid-2022? What is it for today? Do you need to have it? We will answer all these questions below.
Since NVIDIA acquired the intellectual property of PhysX by acquiring the company Ageia in 2008, they started using it as a hardware acceleration engine on their GeForce graphics cards, and to this day it is still part of the software suite of the brand and in fact it keeps appearing in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
But what does it do? Should we still have it in the middle of 2022, when its technology already seems largely outdated?
What is NVIDIA PhysX good for in mid-2022?
As we mentioned earlier, PhysX was originally advertised as an engine for moving particles via hardware acceleration, and for this reason, its name conjures up the word “physics”, which is nothing more than motion. objects in a scene. . And in the middle of 2022, physics in games continues to play an important role since, for example, imagine a FIFA in which the ball does not bounce or does not do so in a natural way, or in which after breaking a glass the balls do not come out. shards fired in all directions. This is precisely what PhysX takes care of.
In fact, this method is currently one of the most popular when it comes to representing physics in games without having to write millions of lines of specific code, because it is also so versatile that it can go from from a toppled building (with its crystals, dust, debris, etc.) to the movement of Superman’s cape, to the ball physics in sports games or the splatter of blood in your favorite RPGs.
PhysX is currently at version 9, so you’ll understand it’s come a long way since it was first included, and as NVIDIA continues to actively develop it and bundle it with its suite of drivers and software, it goes without saying that we will continue to update PhysX. watching for a long time, at least until they manage to develop a physics engine that works better or more efficiently and at a lower cost.
Therefore, and answering the questions in the statement, despite being an already very long-lived PhysX engine still makes sense today, and will continue to do so for years to come. And don’t worry, because if you have an NVIDIA graphics card and you install its graphics drivers (which makes sense), the PhysX ecosystem will be installed along with everything else, so it’s not something you have to care or worry about to do something about it.
