Especially when it got picked up by Epic and integrated in the Unreal engine. With actual customers actually using the thing in actual games. This all changed when the hobby project became PhysX under Ageia. We loved it, we worked very hard on it, but we basically had no customers and no actual games making actual requests for random features that are actually useful in games. In a number of ways the result was still just that: a hobby project. NovodeX was the fusion of two hobby projects from two independent developers. NovodeX did not even support convex objects! And that’s the first thing I had to implement in the post-NovodeX days. In the beginning, we had to make the SDK feature-complete before thinking about making it run faster. From our perspective the gains from SSE seemed limited, using SSE2 would have made the SDK incompatible with most of our users’ machines, and we simply didn’t have the time or resources to learn SSE, support SIMD and non-SIMD versions, etc. Also, IIRC SSE2 was not widely supported (only SSE). At that time, none of us knew how to write SSE code, and I also had no experience with multi-threading. But it did not support SIMD or multi-threading. The code was super optimized, to the best of my knowledge at the time. NovodeX (on which PhysX was initially based) was written by Adam and me. There is no evil plan to cripple this or that.

But the reality behind it here is terribly mundane and ordinary. I suppose it makes a good story to reveal nasty things about “big” companies like MS, Google, Apple, Nvidia, whatever.

I’m afraid you’ve been spoon-fed utter bullshit by websites that love an easy dramatic headline. But I’d like to go back to the old “2.8.4 is crippled” myth, since this is mentioned here again (”PhyX 2.x was garbage because a ton of sites outed nVidia for using x87 and lacking multi-threading on the old CPU code”). So, yes, PhysX 3 is well optimized (and PhysX 3.4 even more).

What happened to physx