14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has just announced that GPU acceleration support has been added on the Linux platform for PhysX, the complex physics simulation developed by the company.
PhysX has been around for many years on the Windows platform and it's been a coveted feature. There was no practical interest from the NVIDIA devs to make it compatible with Linux as long as there were no applications or games to take advantage of it.
With the launch of Steam for Linux, things have changed quite a bit. The OpenGL development has a slightly better development pace, more than 700 games are now available on Steam for Linux, and NVIDIA's drivers for this platform have improved quite a lot. It was just a matter of time until all of the NVIDIA's technologies eventually landed in the open source architecture.
What does it mean for the average Joe?
So, NVIDIA has just released a new Physics SDK 3.3.2 and they mention the fact that now GPU acceleration support has been added on Linux. Until now, the Physics computations were done through the CPU, which would have an obvious effect on the performance of that game. The NVIDIA developers have been working for some time to make this technology work natively and it looks like they did it.
"PhysX is a scalable multi-platform game physics solution supporting a wide range of devices, from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs. PhysX is already integrated into some of the most popular game engines, e.g. UE3/UE4. PhysX also enables simulation-driven effects like Clothing, Destruction and Particles."
"While the PhysX SDK is designed primarily for game developers, it is also used by researchers, educators, and simulation application developers who need real time performance and robust behavior. Features include discrete and continuous collision detection, raycasting and shape sweeps, solvers for rigid body dynamics, fluids, and particles, as well as vehicle and character controllers," reads the official NVIDIA website.
The PhysX engine is actually integrated into a much bigger package called GameWorks, which is a collection of tools built by the NVIDIA developers. It's one of the most important components and we now expect to see a lot of games using it.
Unfortunately, if you are not a developer, it's difficult to see the changelog for the latest version, but we have access to the release notes and they say this: "Linux: Now supports GPU PhysX."
Technically, the support for PhysX is already present in the NVIDIA drivers for the Linux platform, but there are few games that actually integrate it. Borderlands 2, for example, is one of the games that rely heavily on PhysX.
The new SDK is aimed at developers, so if you're a regular user there is not much you can do with it. In any case, you can download it from the official website, but you will need to register.