Apparently, many owners of graphics cards from NVIDIA met on the Internet a lot of recommended additional utilities for installation on computers, except for the required drivers. Very often, software called PhysX is mentioned. What PhysX is, by and large, few ordinary users can imagine, considering this application a kind of control program or something like a means of overclocking video cards. Let's try to figure out what it really is and what it is for.
What is PhysX?
The first thing to note is that PhysX is an additional engine that allows you to implement the processing and modeling of many physical phenomena in the form of three-dimensional computer models.
Very often, their use can be seen in modern computer games, which significantly increases the requirements for graphics accelerators. But this is only one side of the coin. If we talk about what PhysX is in terms of software that interacts with the video card interface, you can really find the similarities with the driver, since the main application (without the SDK) is also installed as a discrete driver.
At the same time, in the program itself, you can also find a special control panel with graphic characteristics of the installed adapter.
The main directions in modeling
If we consider what PhysX is in the sense of a medium for modeling physical phenomena (it is not in vain that its name is pronounced “physics”), we can distinguish several main directions concerning the most accurate reproduction of the processes of interaction of media or some objects with each other, again same when creating computer games.
It is clear that in a game it is quite difficult to achieve realistic fluid behavior by writing program code. Thus, in PhysX there are three main areas in which modeling is performed:
With all this, one can observe the cross interaction of the above components with each other, and not just the behavior of any one of them.
Installing NVIDIA PhysX for Windows
Now a few words about installing this software on computers running Windows, and a little about how necessary this application is to the owners of NVIDIA graphics chips. Let's start with the last one. It turns out that owners of NVIDIA graphics cards should have such a discrete driver on their computer, although not necessarily. The use of such an additional engine will allow to slightly unload the central processor, which may be responsible for processing textures using hardware acceleration, and transfer some functions to the graphics core.
But for the programmers installing this software along with the SDK for developers, it can be a very serious help when creating computer games using a variety of modeling templates, environment or object behavior to optimize the process.
Actually, the installation is very simple. You need to download the necessary components from the official site, and then integrate them into the system, following the prompts of the built-in “Wizard”.
Can PhysX be used for other graphics cards?
On the Internet, some users and developers claim that this software product can be used exclusively when working with NVIDIA graphics cards. This is not true. Back in 2008, someone named Eran Redit based on the PhysX SDK was able to launch and optimize hardware support for Radeon 3870 series graphics accelerators, after which he was even invited to join the development team. According to other information, despite the availability of open source code and the distribution of this software under the GNU license, it seems that NVIDIA has repeatedly stated that support for ATI's GPUs (graphics processors) is not part of its plans and will not have support. But there was a loophole. The fact is that many game developers for realistic simulation of game processes are invited to install a special APEX PhysX package, which allows designers and artists to perform the necessary actions to draw objects without the explicit participation of programmers.
Possible problems with installation, functionality, and simplest troubleshooting methods
As for installation crashes, most often they appear for some reason when trying to install PhysX in Windows 7 (mostly there are crashes with numbers 1714 and 1316), and it is during the re-installation. It is not known for certain why this is happening, but some experts have found that for the most part this is due to incorrect primary or reinstallation of NVIDIA drivers (or when replacing video cards, but with the PhysX package installed), for which even optimizer programs do not always delete the corresponding ones registry entries. In this situation, you will have to delete all the driver libraries entirely and completely manually.
Sometimes you can recommend using the Driver Sweeper utility, select the PhysX component (if you cannot reinstall it), and then analyze it. All found objects must be deleted, then cleaned the system registry (again on your own, by searching by the name of the applet - PhysX), and then perform a complete restart of the computer. And only after all the above steps, you can install the PhysX package again. In addition, it may very well be that the PhysX version itself does not correspond to the operating system or graphic chip model. It is also necessary to pay attention to this.