ZLUDA Lets AMD Radeon GPUs Run NVIDIA PhysX Games With Big FPS Gains

For those unfamiliar, ZLUDA is a tool that allows unmodified CUDA code to run on non-NVIDIA GPUs. Up until a few months ago, it was being commercially funded, but ZLUDA is back to being a weekend project for now. That said, with the latest version 6 update, AMD GPUs now have limited support for 32-bit PhysX, Blender texture support has been added, and Windows support has been improved.

It is important to note that the 32-bit PhysX support for AMD GPUs isn't yet complete. Fluid simulations remain glitchy, and loading ZLUDA at all can be tricky for Steam games. Even so, it's an important step forward, and even with preliminary support, some games show massive performance improvements.

The only example given is Mafia II (2010), but the results with PhysX enabled on an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT go from just 26.2 FPS to 80.2 FPS with ZLUDA enabled in the game's official benchmark tool.


While the current state of PhysX on AMD GPUs is limited, it could be a quite literal game changer for fans of older games that currently own a Radeon, even more so if support is extended to the 64-bit GameWorks version of PhysX at some point. This is entirely possible, since project developer Vosen notes that "the priority is no longer what makes commercial sense, but what I find most entertaining."

With this ZLUDA update, modern AMD GPUs support 32-bit PhysX better than NVIDIA RTX 50 Series GPUs did at launch. Fortunately for NVIDIA users, 64-bit GameWorks-enabled PhysX titles will still run fine on 50 Series cards, and a December driver update thankfully restored 32-bit PhysX on the RTX 50 Series. For a fans of historic games reliant on or improved by PhysX support, including Mirror's Edge, the Batman Arkham series, and Borderlands 2, these are welcome efforts to say the least.