A few days ago, it came to light that Nvidia has dropped support for 32-bit CUDA applications with its latest RTX 50-series (Blackwell) GPUs. Support for PhysX has gradually faded over the years. However, PhysX can still be offloaded to an RTX 40-series (Ada Lovelace) or older GPU, and that's exactly what a user at Reddit has done. In addition, we've gathered some interesting benchmarks, courtesy of VerbalSilence on YouTube and the same Reddit user, where the GTX 980 Ti handily outperforms the RTX 5090 in 32-bit PhysX games.
PhysX is fully functional in 64-bit applications like Batman: Arkham Knight, so Nvidia hasn't abandoned the technology entirely. However, the GPU maker has retired 32-bit CUDA support for RTX 50-series GPUs (and likely beyond). Given the age of the technology, most games with PhysX were compiled using 32-bit CUDA libraries. This is a software limitation, for the most part, though maintaining support for legacy environments is easier said than done.
