There’s no denying the wealth of performance GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics card offer, with and without the assistance of AI, but this power apparently isn’t all-encompassing. In an unfortunate turn of events, Nvidia has discontinued support for 32-bit CUDA applications on its latest pixel pushers. This leaves the likes of RTX 5090 and its siblings unable to support PhysX effects in older games unlike prior generation models.
Nvidia forums user MrEWhite put the change of support into the spotlight, after noticing PhysX effects in Borderlands 2 were running on their CPU rather than RTX 50 Series GPU. In response, an Nvidia representative succinctly replied that this is “expected behaviour as 32-bit CUDA applications are depreciated on GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs.”
There’s little GeForce RTX 50 Series can do to combat this change save for installing a secondary graphics card as a dedicated PhysX accelerator. It is possible to run some PhysX effects on your CPU but expect performance and fidelity to take a noticeable hit in comparison to them running on CUDA cores.
YouTube channel Compusemble clearly demonstrates the difference between CPU and GPU acceleration in rendering PhysX effects. Even on a relatively high-end system powered by a Ryzen 7700X plus an RTX 4090, frame rates dropped from around 200fps to 40fps when using the processor to calculate physics.
While support for older games that use 32-bit CUDA instructions is out the window, including classics like Batman: Arkham City, this doesn’t amount to all PhysX effects falling by the wayside. More recent implementations with 64-bit instruction sets, including Batman: Arkham Knight, still work just fine on GeForce RTX 50 Series cards.
PhysX isn’t as commonplace as it was over a decade ago, as hardware-agnostic physics engines like Havok understandably became more popular. You’ll have seen it in action in the likes of Helldivers 2 but I maintain a soft spot for its use in Red Faction: Guerilla. However, PhysX still lives on in Nvidia’s Omniverse.
I hope that community efforts can restore some 32-bit support to GeForce RTX 50 Series. Who knows, perhaps AI could lend a hand in sourcing a solution.
