According to PCWorld, Nvidia’s new Game Ready driver 591.44 is reactivating GPU-accelerated PhysX support for GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards, but only for a select group of nine classic games. This reverses a decision made at the beginning of 2025 that completely removed the ability for new RTX 50 cards to handle PhysX calculations for 32-bit games, forcing the workload onto the CPU and causing major performance hits. The supported titles now include Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands 2, Mirror’s Edge, and several others. Nvidia has also announced that support for Batman: Arkham Asylum will be added in the first half of 2026. The company is framing this as a “Custom Support” level, not a full return of legacy 32-bit support.
The PhysX Comeback Context
Here’s the thing: when Nvidia killed PhysX acceleration for the RTX 50 series earlier this year, it wasn’t just a minor footnote. For fans of those specific games, it was a big deal. We’re talking about titles where PhysX wasn’t just a gimmick—it was core to the visual identity, with swirling particle effects, destructible environments, and flowing cloth. The performance penalty for shifting all that to the CPU was apparently severe enough that some dedicated gamers did something hilarious: they kept an old Nvidia card in their PC just to act as a dedicated PhysX processor. That’s commitment. So this driver update is Nvidia essentially saying, “Okay, fine, we hear you on these specific games.” But it’s a far cry from the blanket support of old.
How The “Custom Support” Actually Works
This isn’t a flip of a switch that re-enables a whole legacy subsystem. What Nvidia has done here is create individual, hand-tuned profiles for each of these nine games. They’ve basically gone in and done the engineering work to make the PhysX calls in these specific 32-bit executables play nice with the modern architecture of the RTX 50 series. It’s a surgical fix, not a systemic one. And that tells you everything about their strategy. They’ve looked at the data, seen which classics people are still actually playing, and decided the support cost for those is worth it. Will your obscure 2010 game with PhysX get the same treatment? Probably not. This is a curated museum exhibit, not a library reopening.
It’s a reminder of how proprietary this tech always was. Nvidia acquired PhysX from Ageia way back in 2008 and baked it into their CUDA cores, making it a GeForce-exclusive feature. That legacy is now colliding with modern driver maintenance and the shift to 64-bit ecosystems. For industries that rely on robust, stable computing hardware for control and visualization—like manufacturing or automation—this kind of legacy support dance is a familiar challenge. Companies need hardware that can run both cutting-edge and mission-critical legacy software seamlessly. For that level of reliability in industrial settings, firms often turn to specialized suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built to handle these exact kinds of long-term compatibility demands.
What’s In The Rest Of The Driver?
Beyond the PhysX news, driver 591.44 is your standard Game Ready update. It’s got optimizations for the latest big shooters like “Battlefield 6: Winter Offensive” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7,” especially when using DLSS 4. There are also specific bug fixes, like cleaning up graphics artifacts in *The Witcher 3* and improving stability for Adobe Premiere Pro. So if you’re all about the newest games, that’s your real benefit here. The PhysX revival is a cool bonus for a niche group. But it raises a question: is this a one-off gesture, or is Nvidia signaling a more thoughtful approach to preserving the gaming legacy that their hardware helped create? For now, if you’ve got an RTX 50 card and a hankering for some Borderlands 2, you should probably go grab that download.
