Nvidia has quietly removed support for 32-bit PhysX hardware acceleration in its latest RTX 50 gaming GPUs, such as the Nvidia Geforce RTX 5090. This means games such as Mirror’s Edge, Borderlands 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum no longer have GPU-accelerated support for the impressively complex physics simulations PhysX can provide.
With the Nvidia RTX 5090 now the best graphics card you can buy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that as well as supporting brand new features such as DLSS 4, it would also still bring full feature support for old but still popular game features. However, this latest development means any gamers firing up older PhysX-supporting titles will find PhysX calculations being run on the CPU, sometimes resulting in huge performance drops.
For a certain generation of gamer, PhysX was the big new feature in PC gaming. Forget ray tracing or frame generation, a PhysX card could provide performance-boosted realistic physics simulations to make for amazing-looking fog, particle effects, fabric animation, destructible buildings, and more. With Nvidia buying up PhysX and integrating these physics features into its GPUs, a large number of gamers have since had hardware-accelerated access to PhysX effects. That’s why there’s still a separate PhysX section when you install Nvidia drivers. You can see what PhysX can do in the video below.
However, with its latest RTX 50 GPUs, the company has removed this support, returning any such complex PhysX effects to being calculated on the CPU. Even with modern CPUs being so much faster than when PhysX first arrived back in 2005, the complexity of these calculations is still enough to choke performance, as you can see in the video below. It shows Batman: Arkham Asylum running without PhysX effects, with PhysX running on the CPU, and with it running on the GPU.
Not only does the above video show that PhysX calculations being done on a CPU absolutely tanks performance, with the frame rate dropping from around 400fps without PhysX to just 40fps with PhysX, but it also shows that even with PhysX accelerated on the GPU, performance can take a massive hit too. The frame rate here hovers around 200fps with PhysX being run on an RTX 4090 – around half the level it was without these effects.
This hints at one of the reasons PhysX has largely gone the way of the dodo, as the fancy effects it accelerates are just devastating to performance, even when accelerated on a GPU. With such an impact, and given the amount of extra effort required to implement these physics features well, many game developers just stopped featuring PhysX.
The other reason is that more modern game engines such as Unreal Engine 5 include many of its own equivalent physics effects that aren’t so performance-reducing and are easier for developers to implement.
As such, the most recent game that is affected by this change to the RTX 50 series came out in 2013, according to this list of affected titles put together by resetera.com. That title is Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, which is still revered as one of the best Assassin’s Creed games ever.
While Nvidia hasn’t hidden this drop in support, it only really came to light following one gamer’s discovery that enabling PhysX on Borderlands 2 tanked performance. Nvidia replied to the user’s question on its support website saying “This is expected behavior as 32-bit CUDA applications are deprecated on GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs.” The Nvidia representative then linked to this Nvidia support notice describing the change.
There’s no specific mention of the status of 64-bit support for PhysX on RTX 50 GPUs, so we believe any 64-bit versions of these games should still run fine. Support remains for all older Nvidia GPUs too. It’s just that from the RTX 50 series onwards, support will end.
For more on what the RTX 50 series can do, check out our RTX 5090 review and RTX 5080 review, where we put to the test these monstrously powerful new GPUs.
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