Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 Posted by Jim Thacker NVIDIA open-sources PhysX’s GPU simulation code html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" NVIDIA has fully open-sourced the SDK for PhysX, its real-time physics system, and Flow, its gaseous fluid simulation system. Whereas previous releases came with compiled binaries for GPU acceleration, the releases of PhysX 5.6 and Flow 2.2 include full GPU source code. A game physics technology now used in offline simulation tools for 3ds Max and Maya Initially a real-time dynamics system for games, PhysX is supported in game engines including O3DE and Unity, although it has been superseded by Chaos physics in Unreal Engine 5. However, it is also now used as a physics engine in a number of offline simulation tools, including 3ds Max particle and physics add-on tyFlow and Maya crowd simulator Golaem. Although primarily a rigid body dynamics system, it also supports soft bodies and position based dynamics for granular materials and liquids. Now fully open-sourced, including GPU simulation code NVIDIA originally partly open-sourced PhysX in 2018, adding gaseous fluid simulation library Flow in 2022. However, in previous releases, only the CPU-side code was fully open-source: GPU support was provided via pre-compiled binaries. The latest releases – the PhysX 5.6 SDK and Flow 2.2 – include the GPU source code, making both technologies fully open-source. That means that it would be possible for developers integrating PhysX into their tools to support AMD or Intel hardware for GPU acceleration, although it would be a lot of work to do so fully. NVIDIA’s blog post notes that PhysX contains over 500 kernels written for CUDA, its GPU compute framework. Availability and system requirements The source code for PhysX SDK 5.6 is available on GitHub under a 3-clause BSD licence. It can be compiled to run on Windows 10+ or Linux, and is tested on Ubuntu 20.04+. You can find build instructions for Windows and Linux on GitHub. The source for Flow 2.2 is provided in the same repository, also under a 3-clause BSD licence. Read NVIDIA’s announcement that it has released GPU source code for PhysX and Flow Download the source code for PhysX SDK and Flow from GitHub Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects. Latest News Adobe releases Photoshop 26.6 Check out the new features in the image-editing software, including nifty new Select Details options in the AI-based Object Selection tool. Thursday, April 24th, 2025 Chaos releases Corona 12 Update 2 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D Update to the renderer adds over 3,100 Chaos Scans materials to the Cosmos library, and improves DoF and volumetric effects. Thursday, April 24th, 2025 Get 260+ modular Wild West building assets for Unreal Engine Get JustB Studios' 1850s Post Office Environment pack of 3D assets for free for two weeks on the Fab marketplace. For commercial use. Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 Get VFX artist Thomas Marcos' free Blender clouds shader Lightweight Procedural Clouds Shader generates realistic clouds in production conditions, and works with the Cycles or Eevee renderers. Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 NVIDIA open-sources PhysX's GPU simulation code Real-time physics framework used in game engines and offline simulation tools for 3ds Max and Maya is now fully open-source. Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 Hair Cinematic Tool 2.0 simplifies hair shading in Unreal Engine 5 Argentum Studio's in-house tool simplifies the process of lighting and rendering hair and fur in Unreal Engine 5.5. Free for a month. Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 More News Tutorial: Creature Animation for Games LightWave Digital releases LightWave 2025 Get the free version of ZibraVDB for Unreal Engine and Houdini See JangaFX's first demo of IlluGen, its app for in-game VFX Autodesk releases Flame 2026 Character Creator gets new free MetaTailor plugin Epic Games releases Twinmotion 2025.1.1 Leopoly adds voxel sculpting to Shapelab 2025 Check out new 3ds Max UV unwrapping plugin UVReactor Reallusion releases iClone 8.53 with timecode support Anima 6.0 adds traffic simulation to Chaos's crowd animation tool ZibraVDB: the new standard in OpenVDB for virtual production Older Posts