what happened?... PhysX

Chapters
0:00 - 0:47 Intro
0:48 - 2:14 What is Ageia
2:15 - 3:27 Nvidia buys Ageia
3:28 - 5:00 Nvidia's ultimate flex
5:00 - 6:15 PhysX in AI

Remember those insane explosions, swirling smoke effects, and glass shattering into a million pieces in games like Mirror’s Edge or Borderlands 2? That was PhysX, a gaming physics technology that promised to change the way we experienced virtual worlds. But behind the flashy effects lies a fascinating story of ambition, innovation, and, well… disappointment.

Originally created by a small company called AGEIA in 2005, PhysX was launched as a $300 Physics Processing Unit (PPU), an extra card you had to buy just to see fancier in-game physics. Unsurprisingly, not many people lined up for it. But in 2008, NVIDIA acquired PhysX, baking it into their GPUs and making it accessible to millions of gamers—at least those with NVIDIA hardware. Suddenly, PhysX became the ultimate flex, with developers pushing it to its limits in iconic games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mirror’s Edge, and Borderlands 2.

However, by the mid-2010s, PhysX had started to lose its shine. With hardware exclusivity, performance issues, and the rise of more practical physics engines like Havok, developers and gamers alike began to move on. But here’s the twist—PhysX didn’t die. Instead, it found a new life outside of gaming.

Today, PhysX powers advanced simulations in AI, robotics, and VR. It helps train self-driving cars, enables industrial design, and teaches robots how to handle real-world physics. From a gaming icon to a behind-the-scenes force shaping the future, PhysX’s legacy is bigger than most people realize.

In this video, we break down the rise, fall, and unlikely comeback of PhysX, exploring how it went from gaming’s most over-the-top tech to quietly making a difference in the real world. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to PhysX—or just want to take a nostalgic trip through its history—this is the video for you.

#GamingHistory
#GamingTech
#PhysX
#NVIDIA
#GPUs
#GamingPhysics
#GameEngines
#TechHistory
#PCGaming
#RetroGaming

[Rill-b]

Couple of additions:
PhysX is still used currently - Unity uses it as the physics engine and UE4 did as well. Majority of the video was focusing on GPU accelerated PhysX.
The feedback and info is overwhelming and super helpful, much appreciated! keep em coming!!!

[crestofhonor]

Kinda strange how Nvidia just dropped support for PhysX on their newest 50 series cards so now they run that stuff slower than older gen cards

[thenaut]

Arkham City has a whole speedrun challenge using PhysX called Carpet%, where, in a very specific place in a ruined and flooded area of Wonder City, there's a room with a wall broken open and a bunch of carpets using PhysX that you can completely displace by jumping around, and the whole goal is to get those carpets out of the hole in the wall as quickly as possible. It's very fun.

[Lvvn]

PhysX was never slow, I was using it since 9600 GT without issues. Tanking frame-rate was a result of constant changes in libraries versions which often resulted in game not recognizing that hardware physX is available and using CPU for it.

[TheJokunen]

I think one problem with physX is that it was actually not able to be significant part of the gameplay, as the game had to work even without it for radeon graphics users, thus was compromised as just as graphical effect, not significant part of the gameplay. Edit:Typo twice

[ashwinnhebbar]

Only 52 subs?! I thought I was watching a channel with 100k+ subs, the quality is off the charts!

[Navhkrin]

Also, Nvidia had really messy naming with this. PhysX isn't just for GPU accelerated physics (like what games listed here used it for). It is also a fully-fledged physics engine that many games have used and are using. It was for example what powered Unreal Engine's physics until Unreal Engine 5 where they switched to their own engine (which unironically performs around 3x slower than PhysX). Physics engine PhysX works really well, comparable to Havok and works cross platform (amd, android whatnot).

Honestly Nvidia should have used different names for physics engine vs gpu physics versions to avoid confusion. As in for GPU physics, thanks to compute shaders it isn't had to make custom implementations nowadays, so no one relies on vendor locked API in GPU physics

I think this video suffers from this confusion. PhysX in gaming is not dead. It is very actively used even nowadays as it is one of the fastest and most stable physics engines. It still powers Unity's physics which by itself accounts for like more than half of the mobile releases. There are even people that integrated PhysX back to UE5.

[ThiagoCamarda]

One cool detail is that even after the Nvidia acquisition you could still have a card dedicated to PhysX. If you had 2 Nvidia GPUs, one could be used specifically as a PhysX processor.

[HazyJ]

[These days] When playing older games, if you have anything faster than a GTX 1050, you can enable PhysX with no perf cost.. It's still impressive to me, like the paper in Arkham Asylum.

[lopwidth]

Half-life 2 did eye movement and physics correct and made a huge leap in realism. Today developers still don't get animation, eye movement, reflection and physics is much more impressive than some 4k textures and 100gb game size. Physx really had something going, that's unfortunately not used in games today

[Hara.]

PhysX in Batman Arkham Asylum is actually amazing. It makes the game look so much better in some areas with the interactive smoke and debris flying around.

[dilvastak]

The funniest thing is that during the development of this tech, its backward compatibility was lost.. For example, modern cards like 5090 cannot normally process physics in Miror Edge or Borderlands 2.

[manicseamonkey]

I’d forgotten about Mirrors Edge. Younger me loved it. Fantastic video, keep up the good work.

[SaviorSix]

PhysX was amazing. I wish it was still around. I still remember playing Borderlands 2 with my GTX 660 and loved how the water ran and how cool the black hole grenade was. I have yet to find a game that has cool physics like that.

[mindmazejoyed]

PhysX was basically early to mid 2000's raytracing tech marketing of today. I remember how after it was bought by NVidia they incorporated it with their GAMEWORKS tech which was highly demanding on entry level gpus and most people preferred keeping them turned off for better fps anyway like me :D

[roarlisfang]

I'm a contributor of NVIDIA Isaac Lab and I wonder why this video pops up in my recommendation lol. One core advantage of PhysX right now is that, it is inherently vectorized thanks to CUDA, meaning it is extremely good in handling massive parallel computations. This is exactly what we need when training robots on cloud architectures. On the gamer's side, PhysX can be used with AMD cards (because it has a CPU mode), so it's not exclusive to NV GPUs, just the CUDA accelerated mode is.

[takashy]

I remember when I came across that multiplayer PhysX game. It was pretty dang mindblowing seeing cloth simulations and a bunch of physics objects react to explosions and what not hah

[arx]

and now Nvidia stopped the support of it on their RTX 50 series....greeaaaat....

[Valterrrr]

Randomly stumbled upon this video, gotta say the video/production quality is amazing for smaller channel, great work.

[Densiozo]

Physx never disappeared. It's still here. It's installed automatically. It's not a hassle to make it work anymore. Same will happen to Ray Tracing in the future