Surprise! Nvidia brings PhysX back to GeForce RTX 50 GPUs, kind of
Image: Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
Nvidia is reactivating a feature that many of you may have already written off: The new Game Ready driver 591.44 brings back PhysX support for selected older games.
For owners of a GeForce RTX 50 graphics card, this is a very relevant change — especially if you enjoy playing classic games with elaborate physics effects.
Why PhysX is important – and why it was removed
PhysX has been a mainstay in PC gaming for many years, creating realistic effects for fabrics, smoke and particles in titles such as “Borderlands 2” and “Batman: Arkham City.” But Nvidia cancelled PhysX support at the beginning of 2025: New RTX-50 series graphics cards could no longer accelerate PhysX calculations in 32-bit games via GPU. As a result, the calculations landed entirely on the CPU — with significant performance losses compared to prior generation GeForce cards.
Some gamers reacted with a hilarious, yet totally functional workaround: They plugged an older Nvidia card into their computer just to be able to continue using PhysX effects.
Driver 591.44: PhysX returns – but only for select games
With the current driver, there is now a turnaround. Nvidia is introducing a so-called “Custom Support” level. This is not a complete return of the old 32-bit support, but rather individually created profiles for a hand-picked selection of particularly popular PhysX titles.
These nine games now benefit from GPU acceleration again:
- Alice: Madness Returns
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
- Batman: Arkham City
- Batman: Arkham Origins
- Borderlands 2
- Mafia II
- Metro 2033
- Metro: Last Light
- Mirror’s Edge
Nvidia has announced additional support for “Batman: Arkham Asylum” for the first half of 2026.
Whether other games will follow remains to be seen. Nvidia writes that it has initially focused on the most popular classics that are still frequently played today.
PhysX technology originally comes from Ageia, which developed its own physics processor unit (PPU) around 20 years ago. Nvidia took over Ageia in 2008 and integrated PhysX calculations directly into the CUDA cores of its own GeForce graphics cards. This made the additional PPU card superfluous, but also tied the effects firmly to Nvidia hardware.
Driver also brings optimizations and bug fixes
In addition to the return of PhysX, Nvidia’s new Game Ready driver offers further improvements:
- Optimizations for “Battlefield 6: Winter Offensive” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7”, especially in conjunction with DLSS 4.
- Fixes for graphics artifacts in “The Witcher 3”.
- Stability fixes for Adobe Premiere Pro.
Driver 591.44 is available for download as usual via the Nvidia app or the Nvidia website.
If you play classic games with PhysX effects, the update should bring noticeable improvements — often significantly higher frame rates and reactivated graphical effects. If, on the other hand, you only play modern titles, you will primarily benefit from the general optimizations and bug fixes.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
Author: Viviane Osswald, Autorin
Viviane Osswald ist freie Redakteurin und Tech-Enthusiastin mit einer besonderen Leidenschaft für Mobile-Tech. Egal, ob Smartphones, Gadgets oder die neuesten Trends aus der Welt von Apple und Android – sie ist in beiden Welten zu Hause. Neben Technik widmet sie sich gerne Lifestyle-Themen, kulinarischen Entdeckungen sowie Filmen und Serien. Mit ihrer Begeisterung für moderne Technologien liefert sie gerne praxisnahe Tipps und spannende Einblicke, die den Alltag bereichern.
