However, after Ageia's acquisition by Nvidia, dedicated PhysX cards have been discontinued in favor of the API being run on CUDA-enabled GeForce GPUs.

[3] In 2004, Ageia acquired NovodeX AG and began developing a hardware technology that could accelerate physics calculations, aiding the CPU.

[6] Nvidia started enabling PhysX hardware acceleration on its line of GeForce graphics cards[7] and eventually dropped support for Ageia PPUs.

[24] After Nvidia's acquisition of Ageia, PhysX development turned away from PPU expansion cards and focused instead on the GPGPU capabilities of modern GPUs.

Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for accelerating physical simulations using PhysX.

Such unified physics solvers are a staple of the offline computer graphics world, where tools such as Autodesk Maya's nCloth, and Softimage's Lagoa are widely used.

In response to the Real World Technologies analysis, Mike Skolones, product manager of PhysX, said[32] that SSE support had been left behind because most games are developed for consoles first and then ported to the PC.

Senior PR manager of Nvidia, Bryan Del Rizzo, explained that multithreading had already been available with CPU PhysX 2.x and that it had been up to the developer to make use of it.

[25] As one of the handful of major physics engines, it is used in many games, such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Warframe, Killing Floor 2, Fallout 4, Batman: Arkham Knight, Planetside 2, and Borderlands 2.

Video games with optional support for hardware-accelerated PhysX often include additional effects such as tearable cloth, dynamic smoke or simulated particle debris.