50
devNews
5y

--- NVIDIA announces PhysX SDK 4.0, open-sources 3.4 under modified BSD license ---

NVIDIA has announced a new version, 4.0, of PhysX, their physics simulation engine.
Its new features include:

- A "Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS)", an algorithm used in this SDK to make things such as robots, character arms, etc. more robust to move around. NVIDIA demonstrates this in the video by making their old version of PhysX, 3.4, seem like an unpredictable mess, the robot demonstrating that version smashing a game of chess.
- New filtering rules for supposedly easier scalability in scenes containing lots of both moving and static objects.
- Faster queries in scenes with actors that have a lot of shapes attached to them, improving performance.
- PhysX can now be more easily used with Cmake-based projects.

In essence, better control over scenes and actors as well as performance improvements are what's new.

Furthermore, NVIDIA has released PhysX version 3.4 under the 3-Clause-BSD-license, except for game console platforms.
As NVIDIA will release the new version on December 20th, it will also be released under the same modified BSD license as PhysX 3.4 is now.

What are your thoughts on NVIDIA making a big move towards the open-source community by releasing PhysX under the BSD license? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

Sources:
https://news.developer.nvidia.com/a...
https://developer.nvidia.com/physx-...
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/...

Comments
  • 8
    Post written by @filthyranter
  • 10
    Wow, this is pretty cool stuff. Also, open source Nvidia, heck yes.
  • 4
    Meh! I hope this will help fix the terrible wheel collider and kinematic rigidbody bugs. But anyways i appreciate it! I think its a move in the right direction for novideo. But i’d rather use a bullet-lite implementation for now.
  • 3
    @PreyK Actually, that's exactly what's being shown as fixed in the video (see first sources link) :)
Add Comment