Nvidia might’ve just launched its RTX 50-series GPU flagship graphic card. But with it, it also pulled the rug from under a chunk of classic PC games — and it barely bothers to warn anyone. Gamers recently discovered that PhysX, the once-popular physics engine, no longer works properly with RTX 50 in more than 40 games. This happened as Nvidia quietly dropped support for 32-bit CUDA applications, breaking PhysX physics simulations in many older titles.
MrEWhite, a Reddit user, noticed something was off when PhysX refused to run on their RTX 50 GPU in multiple games. Even when enabled, it defaulted to CPU processing, tanking performance. After some digging, he found various other RTX 50-series have reported the same issue on the Nvidia support forum.
Nvidia support responded when asked about the problem in the forum. They said the PhysX issue is an ‘expected behavior’ due to the removal of 32-bit CUDA support on RTX 50 series GPUs.
Based on player reports, older games like Borderlands 2 suffered severe performance drops. MrEWhite, who’s running RTX 5090 with a Ryzen 9800X3D, wrote that frame rates will dip below 60 FPS just from shooting a shock-element gun at a wall. Meanwhile, games with 64-bit PhysX like Batman: Arkham Knight work as smooth as butter on an RTX 50 series.
This effectively breaks the PhysX for many 32-bit games relying on Nvidia’s physics engine for object simulation and dynamic effects running on RTX 50 Series. Those include fan favorites like Mirror’s Edge, Batman: Arkham City, Bulletstorm, and Assassin’s Creed 4, among others.
ResetEra user RandomlyRandom67 has made a list of all currently known 42 games that utilize GPU-accelerated PhysX, which could have issues on RTX 50:
- 7554.
- Alice: Madness Returns.
- Armageddon Riders.
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
- Batman: Arkham Asylum.
- Batman: Arkham City.
- Batman: Arkham Origins.
- Blur.
- Borderlands 2.
- Continent of the Ninth (C9).
- Crazy Machines 2.
- Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason.
- Dark Void.
- Darkest of Days.
- Deep Black.
- Depth Hunter.
- Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage.
- Hot Dance Party.
- Hot Dance Party II.
- Hydrophobia: Prophecy.
- Jianxia 3.
- Mafia II.
- Mars: War Logs.
- Metro 2033.
- Metro: Last Light.
- Mirror’s Edge.
- Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia.
- MStar.
- Passion Leads Army.
- Rise of the Triad.
- Sacred 2: Fallen Angel.
- Sacred 2: Ice & Blood.
- Shattered Horizon.
- Star Trek.
- Star Trek D.A.C.
- The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
- The Secret World.
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2.
- Unreal Tournament 3.
- Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction.
- QQ Dance.
- QQ Dance 2.
From dropping 32-bit PhysX support on the RTX 50 series, it could be the beginning of Nvidia slowly killing support for legacy PC games. Many classic titles were built with 32-bit architectures, and removing support without a workaround means players must rely on community patches. Or worse, a community patch is nowhere in sight, and in the future, everyone will have just to accept broken physics.
If you’re a fan of PhysX-heavy games listed above, you might want to hold off on upgrading to an RTX 50-series GPU for now.
