During my brief hiatus, a lot has happened. Consumers have seen the launch of NVIDIA’s RTX 5000 series graphics cards, which may very well be the worst generational upgrade the company has ever produced.
Availability has been virtually nonexistent, and with the looming threat of trade tariffs coming in March, retailers have taken advantage of the situation, deliberately inflating prices on the scarce RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070/Ti units by hundreds of dollars above MSRP.
Despite this, the primary point of contention remains the performance, or lack thereof of the RTX 5000 series. Alongside the ongoing issues with the 12VHPWR connector burning out, the RTX 5080 has sparked debate due to its minimal improvements over its predecessor.
With a similar number of cores as the RTX 4080 Super (10,752 CUDA cores vs. 10,240), the only notable upgrade comes from increased memory bandwidth thanks to GDDR7.
Yet, despite this, the RTX 5080 delivers an embarrassingly low <10% performance gain over the previous 80-series Super model.
Meanwhile, the recently launched RTX 5070 Ti, which features a similar core count to the previous-generation RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and was supposedly set to launch at the same $750 MSRP, is nowhere to be found at that price.
Despite this, it only delivers a modest 7% performance increase over its predecessor, making the Blackwell architecture one of NVIDIA’s most disappointing generational improvements since the introduction of the RTX 2000 series.
If you can even get your hands on a new GeForce GPU, especially at MSRP and accept its underwhelming performance, you might at least take comfort in its ability to play retro games, right? Well, apparently not. NVIDIA has silently removed 32-bit support for PhysX technologies with the RTX 5000 series.
Similar to how both NVIDIA and AMD have abandoned older Windows operating systems, first with Windows 7 and soon Windows 10, NVIDIA has now abruptly rendered its PhysX technology obsolete and incompatible with modern hardware.
As a result, older games that rely on PhysX are suffering severe performance issues.
PhysX, initially developed by Ageia and later acquired by NVIDIA in the 2000s, became a defining feature of GeForce hardware under the company’s proprietary CUDA framework.
The technology provided developers with advanced physics simulations, enabling realistic effects such as shattering glass, fluid dynamics, cloth interactions, and smoke particles. These intricate visual enhancements played a pivotal role in shaping game design, cementing PhysX’s legacy, though often at the cost of performance.
NVIDIA has quietly removed 32-bit support for PhysX in its latest graphics chips, as confirmed by the company this week. Buyers first noticed the change when PhysX-enabled games like Borderlands 2 began offloading physics calculations to the CPU instead of the GPU, leading to massive frame drops or outright failure to function.
NVIDIA references a support page from January, which states that the RTX 50 series would not support 32-bit CUDA applications. However, this page does not explicitly mention PhysX, and NVIDIA’s other PhysX-related documentation remains outdated by several years.
This removal is particularly concerning given the increasing popularity of older games. A recent Pringles survey found that 24% of Gen Z now own a retro gaming console. Popular choices include the Game Boy (1989-2003), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1990-2003), and the original Xbox (2002-2009) 89 percent of the gamers polled said that old-school, offline retro games give them a break from the web, and 74 percent agreed that vintage games are more relaxing to play.
Additionally, a Consumer Reports survey found that 14% of North American gamers still actively play titles released before the year 2000 and notably, none of the top five games on the Epic Games Store in 2024 were released that year, reflecting a shift in gaming habits.
This trend highlights the growing dissatisfaction with modern gaming, as increasing development times, skyrocketing budgets, and a focus on ideological messaging have eroded the industry’s appeal. As a result, more players are revisiting older titles that predate the era of corporate-driven political activism and forced diversity initiatives that have raped the industry to death.
The removal of 32-bit PhysX support on modern NVIDIA hardware has introduced compatibility issues for older titles such as Mirror’s Edge, Borderlands 2, Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, Mafia 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. PhysX was a highly scalable and versatile technology, enhancing smoke effects, interactive cloth, particle physics, and environmental interactions.
Many 32-bit games relied on NVIDIA’s SDK for these features, benefiting from GPU acceleration via CUDA on supported GeForce cards. Without this support, these effects are now being offloaded to the CPU, leading to significant performance penalties.
Certain PhysX features could still function in games without a compatible GeForce GPU, such as Rigid Body Dynamics, simulating solid objects that do not deform under force. This enabled ragdoll physics for characters and entities in titles like Metro, Batman: Arkham City, Mirror’s Edge, and Unreal Tournament 3.
However, effects such as smoke, fire, cloth, and soft body dynamics required GPU acceleration to run optimally. With the removal of 32-bit PhysX support on RTX 5000 series GPUs, enabling PhysX now results in both reduced performance since additional processing is offloaded onto the CPU and a noticeable decline in visual fidelity as other aspects can’t run on the CPU alone.
In Borderlands 2, PhysX enhances the game’s world by adding dynamic elements such as moving cloth textures in encampments and particle effects like dust clouds and elemental interactions.
A recent video comparison highlights a stark performance disparity between a high-end Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5080 system and an older setup featuring an Intel Core i5-4690K and GTX 980 Ti.
Despite being over a decade old, the GTX 980 Ti system maintains smooth performance, even when handling excessive PhysX particle effects, debris, and sparks. In contrast, the RTX 5080, which now offloads PhysX calculations onto the CPU, suffers massive frame drops, from triple-digit frame rates to below 60 FPS, even plunging into the single digits when overloaded with particles.
With NVIDIA’s latest hardware, the company’s own technologies are becoming obsolete and unusable, forcing users to disable PhysX in-game to maintain playable performance. This results in a loss of immersion and visual quality, all because NVIDIA, the industry leader, decided to move on.
Unfortunately for consumers, PhysX was once a major selling point for NVIDIA, with the company offering financial incentives to developers to integrate its SDKs. These incentives ensured widespread adoption, often at the expense of performance on competing hardware. As a result, many older 32-bit games do not offer an option to disable PhysX entirely.
The only real workaround is to install an older GeForce GPU alongside your modern card, running two separate graphics cards—an impractical solution for most users due to compatibility limitations and increased power demands. While keeping an old GPU as a backup may be an option for some, it is far from a universal fix.
Games like Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason rely entirely on NVIDIA PhysX for fluid simulation, fog effects, and ice physics, with no built-in option to disable it, meaning the game cannot function without some level of PhysX acceleration, either by the CPU or GPU. Other titles, such as Dark Void (2010), use the technology for cloth physics and various effects, also without a way to disable it.
Similarly, Metro 2033, Batman: Arkham Asylum & City, Borderlands 2, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2, and Alice: Madness Returns all integrate PhysX by default, offloading calculations to the CPU in the absence of GPU support.
Games like Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Crazy Machines 2, Unreal Tournament 3, Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel / Ice & Blood, Mirror’s Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum / City / Origins, Metro 2033 / Last Light, Borderlands 2, Mafia II, Hydrophobia: Prophecy, Alice: Madness Returns, The Secret World, Rise of the Triad, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag all rely on NVIDIA’s PhysX technology in some form, whether for cloth physics, fluid simulation, or particle effects.
These titles, which once showcased the power of PhysX, will now face decreased visual fidelity and performance issues due to NVIDIA’s decision to drop 32-bit support on newer RTX 5000 series hardware.
With NVIDIA dropping 32-bit PhysX support, these games will now suffer reduced visual fidelity and, worse still, drastically inferior performance on RTX 5000 series GPUs. This marks a troubling shift, as it could be the first case of modern graphics cards deliberately eliminating compatibility with older games.
This raises the question, how long before AMD and NVIDIA take this further by removing native support for legacy APIs like DirectX 9? Introduced in 2002, DX9 served as the foundation for thousands of PC games until its gradual phase-out in the early 2010s.
Given that both companies have already dropped Windows 7 support (and Windows 10 is next in line), it seems inevitable that DX9’s days are numbered.
Removing native DX9 support would significantly reduce driver overhead by eliminating outdated code, shrinking driver sizes, and reducing potential compatibility issues. While DX9 emulation through D3D9On12 or DXVK can allow older games to function, these solutions are not perfect, leading to performance quirks that hardware manufacturers like NVIDIA no longer see as a priority.
Instead, their focus is firmly on pushing consumers toward the future, at the cost of the past.
