PhysX

NVIDIA PhysX is an open source scalable multi-platform physics simulation solution supporting a wide range of devices, from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs.

The powerful SDK brings high-performance and precision accuracy to industrial simulation use cases from traditional VFX and game development workflows, to high-fidelity robotics, medical simulation, and scientific visualization applications.

high-performance and accuracy to industrial simulation

Experience Powerful, Flexible Simulation

Unified Solver

PhysX 5 provides a wide range of new features including FEM soft body simulation, cloth, particles, and fluid simulation that provides 2-way coupled interaction under a unified solver framework.

Scalability

PhysX 5 offers a highly scalable simulation solution for gaming, robotics, VFX, and more. It provides a simulation that can be run on a wide range of platforms ranging from low-power mobile CPUs through to high-end GPUs, including a new GPU API targeting end-to-end GPU-based reinforcement learning.

Quality and Accuracy

By continuously improving collision detection and the solver, PhysX 5 offers improvements to simulation stability for more robust stacking and joints. Plus, PhysX 5 improves momentum conservation for the articulation system and introduces gyroscopic forces in the rigid body system.

Physics Simulation Libraries

NVIDIA offers three core physics simulation libraries - PhysX, Blast, and Flow.

PhysX

Core, multi-platform physics engine.

PhysX Blast

Fracture and destruction.

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PhysX Flow

Combustible fluid, fire, and smoke.

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Latest PhysX Releases

	New in	Implemented on:
	PHYSX 5	CPUs	NVIDIA GPUs
Rigid Body Dynamics		✔	✔
Scene Query		✔
Joints		✔	✔
Reduced Coordinate Articulations		✔	✔
Vehicle Dynamics		✔
Character Controllers		✔
Soft Body Dynamics (Finite Element Method)	✔		✔
PBD (liquid/cloth/inflatable/shape matching)	✔		✔
Custom Geometries	✔	✔

PhysX 5, formerly exclusively available as part of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, is now available as a BSD3 open source release, including all CPU source code and GPU binaries. Download and get started today.

Get PhysX 5 in
Omniverse Get PhysX 5 CPU source
on GitHub

Latest PhysX Features

Rigid Body Dynamics

Study the movement of multi-body interactions under external forces, such as gravity. PhysX provides industry-proven scalable rigid body simulation on both CPU and GPU.

Scene Query

Perform spatial queries against the simulated world to permit perception and reasoning in a simulated environment. Combined with flexible filtering mechanisms, PhysX provides support for raycast, overlap and sweep queries against the entire world or individual bodies.

Joints

Joints constrain the way bodies move relative to one another. PhysX provides a suite of common built-in joint types and supports custom joints through a flexible callback mechanism.

Reduced Coordinate Articulations

Reduced coordinate articulations provide a linear-time, guaranteed joint-error-free simulation of a tree of rigid bodies. PhysX's implementation closely matches analytical models.

Vehicle Dynamics

PhysX provides accurate and efficient simulation of vehicles, including tire, engine, clutch, transmission and suspension models.

Character Controllers

PhysX provides a kinematic character controller that permits an avatar to navigate a simulated world. It supports rich interactions with both static and dynamically simulated bodies.

Soft Body Dynamics

Finite Element Method (FEM) soft bodies simulate measurable properties of hyperelastic materials to form an accurate and efficient model of elastic deformable bodies.

SDF Colliders

A new Signed Distance Field based collision representation allows PhysX to simulate non-convex shapes like gears and cams without convex decomposition.

Position Based Dynamics

Position Based Dynamics provide a flexible framework for simulating a wide range of phenomena including liquids, granular materials, cloth, rigid bodies, deformable bodies and more. It is used extensively in the VFX industry.

Custom Geometry

PhysX provides a wide range of built-in geometries and, additionally, provides a flexible callback mechanism to allow the application to introduce their own geometry types into the simulation.

PhysX Flow SDK

NVIDIA PhysX Flow enables realistic real time combustible fluid, smoke, and fire simulation.

Learn more about
PhysX Flow

PhysX Blast SDK

NVIDIA PhysX Blast is a destruction and fracture library designed for performance, scalability, and flexibility. Blast consists of three layers catering to users of all technical levels including a bare-bones API for experienced developers, a high-level toolkit, and extensions for custom tooling.

Learn more about
PhysX Blast

Industrial Applications for Features

	Manufacturing Applications	Autonomous Vehicles	Game Development	VFX and Media	Industrial Manufacturing	HPC Visualization	Surgical Applications
Rigid Body Dynamics (TGS or PGS solver)	✔		✔	✔		✔
Scene Query	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Joints	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔		✔
Articulations	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Vehicle Dynamics	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Character Controllers	✔		✔	✔
Soft Body Dynamics	✔			✔	✔	✔	✔
Position Based Dynamics	✔			✔		✔	✔
Flow			✔	✔
Blast				✔

See PhysX in Action

Latest PhysX News

December 7, 2022

Reinforcing the Value of Simulation by Teaching Dexterity to a Real Robot Hand

November 8, 2022

Open Source Simulation Expands with NVIDIA PhysX 5 Release

July 22, 2021

Change the Rules of the Game: NVIDIA Omniverse Brings an Arsenal of RTX and AI-Powered Apps, Extensions and DIY Toolkits to Accelerate Game Development Pipelines

June 21, 2021

NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Omniverse Now Available in Open Beta

NVIDIA Omniverse

NVIDIA Omniverse™ is an open platform for virtual collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation. Creators, designers, researchers, and engineers can accelerate their workflows with one-click interoperability between leading software tools in a true-to-reality shared virtual world.

Physically Accurate Simulation

Omniverse is a platform built from the ground up to be physically based and , integrated with core technologies including MDL for materials, PhysX 5, Flow, and Blast for physics, and RTX technology for real time ray and path tracing. Omniverse features several core apps tailored to accelerate specific workflows. PhysX 5 is exclusively available to the public as part of Omniverse.

Explore Omniverse

Develop Tools on Omniverse

Unlike monolithic development platforms, Omniverse was designed to be easily extensible and customizable with a modular development framework. Developers can easily build extensions, apps and microservices using Omniverse Kit.

Develop on Omniverse

Try PhysX 5 today in NVIDIA Omniverse

Get started