Nvidia GameWorks is a middleware software suite developed by Nvidia.^[1] The Visual FX, PhysX, and Optix SDKs provide a wide range of enhancements pre-optimized for Nvidia GPUs.^[2] GameWorks is partially open-source.^[3] The competing solution being in development by AMD is GPUOpen, which was announced to be free and open-source software under the MIT License.

Components

Nvidia Gameworks consists of several main components:

• VisualFX: For rendering effects such as smoke, fire, water, depth of field, soft shadows, HBAO+, TXAA, FaceWorks, and HairWorks.
• PhysX: For physics, destruction, particle and fluid simulations.
• OptiX: For baked lighting and general-purpose ray-tracing.
• Core SDK: For facilitating development on Nvidia hardware.

In addition, the suite contains sample code for DirectX and OpenGL developers, as well as tools for debugging, profiling, optimization, and Android development.