PhysX
NVIDIA PhysX is a 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 highm-fidelity robotics, medical simulation, and scientific visualization applications.
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.
Latest PhysX Releases
| PHYSX 5 | PHYSX 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Rigid Body Dynamics(TGS or PGS solver) | ✔ | ✔ |
| Scene Query | ✔ | ✔ |
| Joints | ✔ | ✔ |
| Reduced Coordinate Articulations | ✔ | ✔ |
| Vehicle Dynamics | ✔ | ✔ |
| Character Controllers | ✔ | ✔ |
| Soft Body Dynamics (Finite Element Method) | ✔ | |
| Cloth (Finite Element Method) | ✔ | |
| PBF(liquid/cloth/inflatable/shape matching) | ✔ | |
| FLIP(large scale water simulation) | ✔ | |
| Custom Geometries | ✔ | |
| Material Point Method (MPM) | 🔨 | |
| Molecular Dynamics | 🔨 |
PhysX 5 provides a unified framework to simulate rigid bodies, particles and deformable bodies. PhysX 5 includes advanced versions of PhysX 4 features, plus merged capabilities of FleX—our GPU physics system for discrete particle simulation, liquids, cloth, inflatables, mass-spring systems, pseudo-rigid bodies and plastic deformation through the use of shape matching.
In addition, PhysX 5 introduces support for deformable simulation using the Corotational FEM model. These new features interact seamlessly with each other and the existing PhysX rigid body dynamics to provide an efficient and flexible multi-physics simulation that allows the simulation of complex coupled problems.
PhysX 5 is exclusively available to the public in the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. Download the open beta today. To explore licensing PhysX 5, please apply for early access today.
The NVIDIA PhysX 4 SDK is a scalable multi-platform physics solution supporting a wide range of devices, from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs. PhysX 4 is already integrated into some of the most popular game engines, including Unreal Engine, and Unity3D.
PhysX 4 SDK is available via open source or under a BSD 3 license. With access to the source code, developers can debug, customize, and extend the PhysX SDK as they see fit.
DOWNLOAD PHYSX 4
Latest PhysX Features
Rigid Body Dynamics
Study the movement of multi-body interaction under external forces, such as gravity, with rigid body dynamics. 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 with scene queries. Combined with flexible filtering mechanisms, PhysX provides support for raycast, overlap and sweep queries against the entire world or individual actors.
Joints
Joints constrain the way actors 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 error-free simulation of a kinematic tree of N rigid bodies. PhysX's implementation closely matches analytical models and accurately conserves momentum.
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 actors.
Soft Body Dynamics
PhysX' FEM soft bodies simulate measurable properties of hyperelastic materials to form an accurate and efficient model of elastic/plastic deformable bodies.
FEM-Based Cloth
Cloth simulation using Finite Element Method (FEM) provides a more accurate and stable cloth simulation than traditional mass-spring simulations by relying on measurable elastic properties of the materials being simulated.
Position Based Fluid (PBF)
Position-Based Dynamics provides a flexible framework for simulating a wide range of phenomena including fluids, granular materials, cloth, ropes, rigid bodies, deformable bodies and more. It is used extensively in the VFX industry.
FLIP
FLIP is a hybrid particle-grid fluid simulation used to efficiently simulate large bodies of water.
Material Point Method (MPM)
The Material Point Method (MPM) is a numerical technique used to simulate the behavior of solids, liquids, gases and any other continuum material.
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.
Molecular Dynamics
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 Blast
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 MOREPhysX Flow
NVIDIA PhysX Flow enables realistic real time combustible fluid, smoke, and fire simulation in a simple to user visual interface with no coding required.
LEARN MOREIndustrial Applications for Features
| Manufacturing Applications | Autonomous Vehicles | Game Development | VFX and Media | Industrial Manufacturing | HPC Visualization | Surgical Applications | Molecular Simulation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rigid Body Dynamics (TGS or PGS solver) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||||
| Scene Query | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Joints | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Reduced Coordinate Articulations | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Vehicle Dynamics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Character Controllers | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||||
| Soft Body Dynamics (Finite Element Method) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Cloth (Finite Element Method) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||||
| PBF (liquid/cloth/inflatable/shape matching) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| FLIP (large scale water simulation) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||||
| Material Point Method (MPM) | 🔨 | 🔨 | 🔨 | 🔨 | 🔨 | 🔨 | ||
| Molecular Dynamics | 🔨 | |||||||
| PhysX Blast (Fracture and Destruction) | ✔ | ✔ | ||||||
| PhysX Flow (Combustible Fluid, Smoke and Fire) | ✔ | ✔ |
See PhysX in Action
Latest PhysX News
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
May 21, 2021
From the Omniverse Experiment Archives: NVIDIA Omniverse RTX Racing Demo Showcases Powerful Rendering, Realistic Simulation
May 13, 2021
NVIDIA Omniverse Machinima Now Available
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.
DOWNLOAD OMNIVERSEDevelop 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
