The launch of the Chameleon’s RTX 50 comes with a few small changes, particularly in terms of software support. The arrival of these cards signals the end of support for 32-bit Cuda and everything that depends on it, in particular Physx on 32-bit games. For example, if you want to play Borderlands 2 or Batman: Arkham City with this technology activated, you won’t be able to… Or the calculations will be done on the CPU side.
PhysX on 32-bit games, no more!
For the record, it was a user by the name of MrEWhite who was surprised to see the technology running on his CPU in Borderlands 2 when he was equipped with an RTX 50. After posting on the NVIDIA forum, he was simply told that this was “expected behaviour”. So the chameleon has quietly made 32-bit Cuda support obsolete.
In broad terms, NVIDIA is announcing the end of 32-bit software support with the RTX 50 and future generations of graphics cards. This obviously poses a major problem of backwards compatibility with games and applications using 32-bit Cuda. In video games, for example, Borderlands 2 we see complaints of framerates dropping below 60 fps with an RTX 5090 and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The reason for this? PhysX calculations are carried out on the processor side, which is clearly not as good at this kind of task as an NVIDIA card.
Of course, we’re talking a lot about Borderlands 2, because it’s an important example of what could be done with the Greens physics engine. But all in all, that’s around forty games that could perform badly or sub-optimally by activating this feature.
In short, a page is being turned in the gaming world. What’s more, these features are still supported by graphics cards ranging from the GTX 900 to the RTX 4000. Similarly, if you want to develop in 32-bit, you’ll need to use a Cuda Toolkit prior to version 12.0.
