NVIDIA Releases PhysX SDK Source Code To Unreal Engine 4 Developers

Hot on the heels of Epic Games’ decision to free the fee (excluding royalties) on its Unreal Engine 4, NVIDIA has announced that it’s also freeing something up: The source code to its PhysX SDK.

Before your mind wanders too much, it’s the CPU-targeted code that’s affected here. It’s still in NVIDIA’s best interest to keep the GPU-accelerated portion exclusive, as it’s the one that’s sunk millions of dollars into research end development, not its competitors.

Nonetheless, what this ultimately gives developers is a way to dig deep into the PhysX SDK on four platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Android, in order to make better use of it in their development. Also with this announcement, NVIDIA’s letting loose the PhysX Clothing and PhysX Destruction features of the SDK, which will allow more developers to integrate them into their own software (be it a game or something else).

As NVIDIA’s Senior Director of Engineering Rev Lebaredian points out, the PhysX SDK isn’t just integrated with UE4, but also UE3, Unity, AnvilNext Engine, Bitsquid Engine, Dunia 2 Engine, and also REDengine – the latter of which is powering the much-anticipated The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, due out in the late spring.

That all said, I think it goes without saying that Unreal Engine 4 is the real target here, as NVIDIA has been working tightly with Epic Games for many years, always pushing the envelope with every new demo to come out. Epic Games’ founder Tim Sweeney even took to NVIDIA’s site to express his excitement.

Overall, this is a great move – even for those who run non-NVIDIA hardware.