Nvidia announced that as of December 3rd, the company open-sourced its PhysX physics simulation engine, under the BSD-3 license.
For anyone not familiar, the license requires that redistributed source carry the same license, binaries must carry a copy of the license, and you can’t use the name of the copyright holder as a promotion tool. It’s fairly wide open.
PhysX was originally designed to provide better physics rendering in games, and came to Nvidia from Ageia in 2008. Originally this was provided by a discrete physics processing card, and then rolled into CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPUs.
The company sees physics as being key to exploding fields like AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and HPC. Open-sourcing PhysX means they hope to get their engine deployed in those markets outside of just games, and subsequently sell more GPUs.
