NVIDIA PhysX, the world's most popular physical simulation engine, goes to open source.

We do this because physics simulation — the key to the development of games and entertainment with a high degree of immersion — turned out to be a much more important area than we ever imagined.

Physics simulation is an area where artificial intelligence, robotics and computer vision, self-driving cars and high-performance computing come together.

It is so fundamental to many different things that we decided to give it access to the whole world - just like Open Source does.

Meanwhile, we continue to develop on the basis of more than a decade of continuous investment in this area, trying to make the simulation of the world perfectly true and accurate, exploring and developing everything necessary for those who work in areas like robotics and autonomous transport.

Free, open source and using GPU

It so happened that PhysX is currently the only free open source solution that uses acceleration on the GPU and is able to work with large virtual environments.

Starting today, PhysX is available as an open source project under the simplest BSD-3 license.

PhysX is designed to solve many serious problems.

• In the field of artificial intelligence, researchers need synthetic data — artificial representations of the real world — used to train data-hungry neural networks;
• In robotics, researchers need to train the mind of robots in an environment similar to the real world;
• For self-driving machines, PhysX provides the ability to wind up millions of miles in a simulation that duplicates the conditions of the real world;
• In game devise, predefined "canning" animations cannot look organically, and their production and subsequent polishing require a lot of time and labor;
• In high-performance computing, physics can be simulated on even more powerful hardware, achieving much greater accuracy;
• This list can be continued for a long time.

The PhysX SDK solves these problems with scalable, stable, and accurate simulations. It is compatible with many things, and now it is also available in Open Source.

NVIDIA PhysX scales to multiple interoperable objects.

PhysX SDK is a scalable, cross-platform physical modeling solution that supports multiple devices, ranging from smartphones to top-end multiprocessing CPUs and GPUs.

It is already integrated into several of the most popular game engines, including the Unreal Engine (versions 3 and 4) and Unity3D.

Full source code posted on github . You can start digging!