NVIDIA RTX 50 Series Drops Support for 32-bit PhysX, Affecting Performance in Older Games
NVIDIA is officially ending support for 32-bit software in its latest GeForce RTX 50 Series of GPUs. This includes the 32-bit PhysX engine, which was once a key part of many games’ physics systems. The transition marks a shift to 64-bit software support, and while older NVIDIA GPUs, from Maxwell to Ada generations, will continue to support 32-bit CUDA, the new RTX 50 Series will not.
What This Means for Legacy Games
This change breaks backward compatibility for legacy games that use 32-bit PhysX, meaning these titles will now need to rely on the CPU for physics processing. As a result, performance could be much lower compared to previous GPUs that supported 32-bit PhysX directly. Some users have reported significant frame rate drops. For instance, a Reddit user experienced frame rates falling below 60 FPS in Borderlands 2 while using an RTX 5090 GPU and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, due to the lack of support for 32-bit CUDA applications in the Blackwell architecture.
However, 64-bit PhysX applications, like Batman: Arkham Knight, still work perfectly fine. The problem mainly affects a large number of older games that many players still enjoy.
Games Affected by the Change
A comprehensive list of games that rely on 32-bit PhysX and will run slower on the RTX 50 Series includes:
- Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
- Crazy Machines 2
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction
- Hot Dance Party
- Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
- Mirror’s Edge
- Borderlands 2
- Metro 2033
- Mafia II
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
The list continues with many other games that will see slower performance unless they are updated to support 64-bit processing.
