NVIDIA's GameWorks library does not have get a lot of good attention from the press, but some players and developers appreciate its features and performance. The Chameleon has decided that it would now be possible to fully exploit these tools under GNU/Linux.

NVIDIA's GameWorks: PhysX is best known for its applications in games. Now that Steam is bringing some of these titles under GNU/Linux, the Penguin OS users have been penalized, as the physical computations are being done by the CPU.

With the release of this new SDK, version 3.3.2, for Linux, this part of the computations may be switched to the GPU, providing better performance and leaving the CPU to take care of something else. Note that you will have to get a CUDA compatible card to enjoy it.

An SDK is a tool for developers, so users will gain nothing for now, but if the developers do their job right, the users will get to enjoy it quite soon. This is yet another closed technology coming to put its foot in the free world, but gamers will clearly not complain.




Source: Le Comptoir du Hardware.