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NVIDIA team unveiled PhysX SDK 4.0, yesterday, and also announced that it’s making its popular real-time physics simulation engine, PhysX, available as open source under the simple BSD-3 license.

“We’re doing this because physics simulation — a long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought. PhysX will now be the only free, open-source physics solution that takes advantage of GPU acceleration and can handle large virtual environments”, says the NVIDIA team.

NVIDIA had designed PhysX specifically for the purpose of hardware acceleration using powerful processors that comprise hundreds of processing cores. This design offers a dramatic boost in the physics processing power, which in turn, takes the gaming experience to a whole new level, offering more rich, and immersive physical gaming environments.

The new PhysX SDK 4.0 is a scalable, open source, and multi-platform game physics solution that offers support to a wide range of devices, ranging from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs. PhysX 4.0 SDK has been upgraded to offer industrial-grade simulation quality at game simulation levels.

PhysX 4.0 comes with Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS), that is capable of adjusting the constraints within games with each iteration, depending on the bodies’ relative motion. Other than that, the overall stability has been improved and now allows for new filtering rules for kinematics and statics. Some of the major features of PhysX SDK 4.0, includes effective memory usage management, support offered for different measurement units and scales, multiple broad-phase, convex-mesh, triangle mesh, and primitive shape collision detection algorithms.

PhysX SDK 4.0 will be made available on December 20, 2018. Public reaction to the news is largely positive as PhysX was earlier available for commercial use for free, but now that its available as open source, people can interact deeply with the physics engine, modifying it as per their needs at absolutely no cost.

For more information, check out the official NVIDIA blog post.

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Tech writer at the Packt Hub. Dreamer, book nerd, lover of scented candles, karaoke, and Gilmore Girls.