You can not say that NVIDIA is the most friendly company with Open Source, however, yesterday it was pleasantly surprised to announce the opening of the PhysX code as Open Source. For those who are lost, PhysX is a physical engine that NVIDIA acquired when it bought the company Ageia, which worked in Physics Processing Units. Since then this technology has been very tied to the GPU and green giant technologies, of which the well-known CUDA can be mentioned .
PhysX is used in multiple fields within computing for simulations of physics, among which are Artificial Intelligence, robotics and vision of computers, self-driven vehicles and high-performance computing . Being published under the 3-clause BSD license ( BSD 3 ), this mode of distribution has reached iOS, macOS, Android ARM (version 2.2 for the SDK and 2.3 for code fragments), Linux (testing on Ubuntu) and Windows XP and above, but the EULA remains unchanged for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. On the other hand, its SDK is currently integrated into Unreal Engine engines 3 and 4 and Unity3D to be used by all developers who want to use it in their projects.
However, it seems that at least for now the execution of PhysX in AMD GPU is an impossibility , so this advance will only serve those who use NVIDIA GPU, because this change has not reached the implementation of this technology for consoles of video game. Another detail to highlight is that this could be more oriented to corporate solutions and the areas mentioned at the beginning of the previous paragraph than to the end user, since until now PhysX has not lavished much on products oriented to the end user compatible with GNU / Linux, In addition, users of the Open Source system expect other movements by the Santa Clara multinational.
The PhysX code has been published under BSD 3 and can be obtained from GitHub. I leave you with an introductory video of PhysX SDK 4.0, which should be available as of December 20 of this year.