Nvidia PhysX

Nvidia PhysX formerly known as Ageia PhysX is an excellent physics engine which can benefit from hardware acceleration if you have an “PhysX” card in your machine, but it does well in “software” mode too.

On Windows the installation is pretty straightforward so I won’t go into that, but on Linux you have to do a little hand work after to get it work.

So first I grabbed the PhysX_2.8.1_SDK_CoreLinux_deb.tar.gz file from here .

After un-tarring the package, i got a “few” debian packages. Well now the “installation” order counts so the best is to give a command like inside the folder where you extracted the debs:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Once that is done, you will see that you are not able to run any of those samples included, because it cannot find the shared libraries (at least not under Ubuntu).

It installs the shared objects to /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/ so we need to do three symbolic links to /usr/lib in order to make this work.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libNxCharacter.so.1 /usr/lib/libNxCharacter.so.1

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libNxCooking.so.1 /usr/lib/libNxCooking.so.1

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libPhysXCore.so.1 /usr/lib/libPhysXCore.so.1

With this done we can check out the installed samples in /usr/sbin/PhysX_Samples_2.8.1_FC4/Bin/linux …

Well this is it … and Happy Coding

GPU Gems

The excellent GPU Gems is now available for free in HTML format at the NVIDIA Developer Zone. This book is a must for every single n00b or pro who is into making 3D demos, games, etc.

This is still a valuable resource, and there are some really cool techniques presented in there.

Go and read it right now by clicking here .

Folks, happy reading!

(Maybe, I’m a bit late, but hey … nobody’s perfect … ha!)