The beauty of the PC platform is its backward compatibility. The whole reason that x86 and Windows have survived as long as they have is because they have largely preserved compatibility with old software. “Nuts to that,” says NVIDIA, who has officially ended support for GPU-accelerated PhysX and CUDA on 32-bit applications with the release of the GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs.
Mirror’s Edge drops as low as 7 FPS on a bleeding-edge 9800X3D + RTX 5080 system.
Borderlands 2 was actually the title that brought this issue to light, as a poster on the official NVIDIA GeForce forums commented that GPU-based PhysX wasn’t working properly in Borderlands 2 on his brand-new GeForce RTX 5090. NVIDIA moderator “Manuel@NVIDIA” posted a matter-of-fact response stating that this was working as intended, and linked to an NVIDIA support page explaining that RTX 50-series cards’ CUDA driver only supports 64-bit applications, and this means no GPU PhysX for Blackwell owners in 32-bit games.
We can’t really imagine why NVIDIA would have made this decision. Certainly, technology marches on, and the most recent game to be affected by this likely came out ten years ago or more. Still, if 32-bit PhysX works fine on the RTX 40 series (and it does), how hard can it be to get it working on Blackwell? It feels like a very intentional decision and certainly not one that PC gamers should approve of. This could sway some purchasers’ opinion of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti we just reviewed, too.