Oh look, nvidia PhysX 5 is open source now: https://github.com/NVIDIA-Omniverse/PhysX I was afraid they would keep it closed, within Omniverse only
@aras Yes, I did not follow why UE is so focused on their physics engine as PhysX was working so well in UE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czuH0Jdqsjs
(Beware, the video is a year old, let's hope it got better since!)
@abde there are advantages to "owning" a piece of tech; namely that you're not dependent on someone else to develop/drive it. Like for ~2 years no one even knew whether nvidia will even make PhysX 5 available to anyone outside of Omniverse!
The downside is, developing own tech takes time, especially as complex as a physics engine. PhysX had 15+ years of feedback and tuning.
@abde I dunno, but if some engine uses PhysX 4 then I'd expect them to at least look/evaluate PhysX 5 now. However, AFAIK UE is trying to move to their own (Chaos), and Unity is undecided whether it wants to move to Havok, or partially-their-own (Dots Physics), or keep PhysX.