Earlier this month we posted here on the blog about the news that Nvidia had made the decision to release the Nvidia PhysX source code if you want to know more about it you can visit the following link.
And well, as mentioned in that article, lNvidia developers continued to work on improving their PhysX engine.
With which The folks at NVIDIA recently released the new version of their PhysX 4.0 physical processes engine., which was the first major release after translation in the open project category.
At the same time, the PhysX 3.4.2 update was released, including corrective changes for the initially open code base.
About Nvidia PhysX
The project code is distributed under the BSD license and it is compatible with Linux, macOS, iOS, Windows and Android platforms.
The need to sign an agreement that EULA left when developing platforms for XBox One, Sony Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch.
In addition to the engine directly under the BSD license, the code and associated PhysX SDK Toolkit are also open.
PhysX is one of the most popular physics engines involved in processing physical interactions in more than 500 games and it is part of many popular game engines, such as Unreal Engine, Unity3D, AnvilNext, Stingray, Dunia 2, and REDengine.
The engine is scalable for a variety of computers, from smartphones to powerful workstations with multi-core CPUs and GPUs, allowing you to fully utilize the capabilities of the GPU to speed up effects processing.
Among the areas of use of PhysX, we can mention the implementation of effects such as destruction, explosions, realistic movements of characters and cars, smoke from waves, trees bent by the wind, water pouring and it flows around obstacles, the flow and tearing of clothing, collisions and interactions with hard and soft bodies.
NVIDIA awaits that after transferring the project to the open category, you will be able to go beyond game development tools and will be in demand in areas such as data synthesis for artificial intelligence research and for neural network training, creating realistic environments for training robots.
Simulation of real conditions in the process of running autonomous vehicles and autopilots. Adapting the engine for high-performance cluster systems is also expected to achieve a new level of detail and precision in the simulation of physical processes.
PhysX 4.0 Release Features
With this new launch of your engine, New features have been added to the project as well as various bug fixes.
In addition, that with this the people of Nvidia hope that many others will join the development of the project.
With this new release the implementation of the TGS algorithm is highlighted (Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver), which allows to improve the quality of the simulation of characters and objects, which consists of many articulated parts.
Besides that the build system was translated to be able to use Cmake.
In this new version of PhysX 4.0 you can see a greater scalability of the filter rules for kinematic and static objects.
And that also a new phase of ABP collision detection was added to the project (automatic multiphase), which in many situations allowed to improve engine performance.
On the other hand, the simplified coordinated joint simulation function (reduced coordinate joint) was added, without relative positioning error and suitable for a realistic simulation of joint movement.
With which also a new BVH structure is introduced, demonstrating better performance for characters with a greater number of shapes.
Finally, what was eliminated in this new version of the project was the support for PhysX and PhysX Cloth particles, which have already been discontinued and the developers do not see the case to continue supporting it.