Describing Nvidia as the most open-source-friendly company would be wrong. However, yesterday Nvidia has announced the release of the PhysX code as an open source. For newbies, PhysX is a physics engine that Nvidia acquired when it bought Ageia, which worked in Physics Processing Units. Since then, this technology has been closely tied to GPUs and green giant technologies, including the well-known CUDA.
PhysX is used in multiple fields within computing for physics simulations, including Artificial Intelligence, robotics and computer vision, self-driven vehicles, and high-performance computing.
Published under the 3-clause BSD license (BSD 3), this distribution modality has reached iOS, macOS, Android ARM (version 2.2 for the SDK and 2.3 for code snippets), Linux (testing on Ubuntu) and Windows XP and higher, but the EULA remains unchanged for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. On the other hand, its SDK is currently integrated into the Unreal Engine 3 and four engines and in Unity3D to be used by all developers who want to use it in their projects.
nvidia Made Its PhysX Code as Open Source On GitHub
However, it seems that at least at the moment the execution of PhysX in AMD GPU is an impossibility, so this advance will only serve for those who use NVIDIA GPU because this change has not come to the implementation of this technology for video game consoles.
Another detail to emphasize is that this could be more oriented to corporate solutions and the areas mentioned above than to the end users. Until now, PhysX has not been lavished much in products oriented to the end user compatible with GNU/Linux, besides that the users of the Open Source system expect other movements on the part of the multinational of Santa Clara.
The PhysX code has been published under BSD 3 and can be obtained from GitHub.
