According to Tom’s Hardware the announcement was made on Nvidia’s forums, confirming that 32-bit PhysX is no longer supported due to the deprecation of 32-bit CUDA applications starting with the RTX 50 series. While RTX 40 series and older GPUs can still run PhysX, it is doomed in the long term.

With no known 64-bit games using PhysX, this eliminates the technology on all RTX 50 series GPUs and future models. PhysX, which was created by Ageia in 2004 and later acquired by Nvidia, played a key role in physics-enhanced gaming, powering effects like ragdoll physics, cloth simulation, and volumetric fluids in major titles.

During its prime in the late 2000s and early 2010s, PhysX was a staple in AAA games such as the Batman Arkham trilogy, Metro series, Borderlands 2, Mirror’s Edge, The Witcher 3, and several Assassin’s Creed titles. The technology used Nvidia’s CUDA platform to run physics simulations on the GPU rather than the CPU, resulting in more detailed effects and higher frame rates.

PhysX adoption sharply declined by the late 2010s as developers moved towards more flexible, cross-platform physics engines. PhysX’s biggest drawback was reliance on Nvidia GPUs, making it unusable on competing graphics cards, consoles, and mobile devices. Nvidia contributed to PhysX’s decline by gradually removing support for key features. For example, Warframe dropped Nvidia’s physics particle simulation in 2018 in favour of an in-house physics engine.

For die-hard PhysX fans, the only way to keep it running on an RTX 50 series GPU is to install an older RTX 40 series or earlier graphics card and dedicate it to PhysX processing in the Nvidia control panel.