NVIDIA Launches PhysX SDK 4.0, As Open-Source Physics Engine

PhysX SDK 4.0 will be available on December 20, 2018. The engine has been upgraded to provide industrial grade simulation quality at game simulation performance.

In addition, PhysX SDK has gone open source, starting today with version 3.4! It is available under the simple 3-Clause BSD license. With access to the source code, developers can debug, customize and extend the PhysX SDK as they see fit.

PhysX has been the market leader in physics simulations for more than a decade. The SDK holds the top spot due to continuous upgrades and optimizations; NVIDIA has ensured that PhysX is always ahead of the curve, enabling developers to deliver state-of-the-art physics simulations.

New features:

• Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS), which makes machinery, characters/ragdolls, and anything else that is jointed or articulated much more robust. TGS dynamically re-computes constraints with each iteration, based on bodies' relative motion.
• Overall stability has been improved with reduced coordinate articulations and joint improvements.
• Increased scalability via new filtering rules for kinematics and statics.
• New Bounding Volume Hierarchies support fast scene queries for actors with a huge number of shapes.
• Infrastructure can now incorporate Cmake projects.

BSD 3 licensed platforms:

• Apple iOS
• Apple Mac OS X
• Google Android ARM (version 2.2 or later required for SDK, 2.3 or later required for snippets)
• Linux (tested on Ubuntu)
• Microsoft Windows XP or later (NVIDIA Driver version R304 or later is required for GPU acceleration)

Unchanged NVIDIA EULA platforms:

• Microsoft XBox One
• Sony Playstation 4
• Nintendo Switch

Download: NVIDIA PhysX 4.0 SDK on GitHub