Warframe has removed their PhysX Particle effects in favour of a universal standard

Warframe’s PhysX Particles have been exclusive to Nvidia GPUs since the game’s release in 2013, offering PC gamers a graphical option which is only available to Nvidia users and inaccessible to owners of Radeon hardware.   

By extension this meant that Warframe’s console versions also lacked PhysX particles, leaving the graphical effect inaccessible to a significant portion of the game’s playerbase. 

In recent months, Nvidia users have started to report issues surrounding Warframe’s game performance, with the game’s developers finding that Warframe’s PhysX was the cause, not due to an error from the developers, but due to Nvidia’s shift towards new technologies. Nvidia no longer supports the module that enables PhysX effects in Warframe. 

To address the issue, Warframe will be moving to a new version of PhysX, an enhanced framework which also drops support for PhysX particles. The developers of Warframe want to take advantage of the updated codebase to offer increased stability and performance, while also creating a unique particle system which will work on all graphics hardware on both PCs and consoles.  

The advantages of this new particle solution are that the effect will be less RAM intensive, work on all platforms and be completely optional within the game’s graphical options menu. 

 

    Since Warframe began, our PhysX Particles have not been ‘one size fits all’. They’ve been tied to specific GPUs, never on console, and it’s been a visually delightful but imbalanced experience. The next Mainline update (this May) will see “Nvidia PhysX Effects” become a new, universal & proprietary experience: “GPU Particles”. Read on for the Why, How, and When!

Why?
The latest version of PhysX (the physics framework that Warframe uses to simulate the world) is dropping support for the physics particle simulation feature. So in order to be able to take advantage of the many performance and stability improvements that Nvidia has made to PhysX over recent years, we’re making a new particle system solution ourselves! This new GPU Particle system will be less RAM intensive, work on all Platforms, AND be completely optional!

How?
We are converting the main PhysX items to our new GPU Particle system. We’ll have many particle FX converted at launch, but will spend some time continuing to upgrade our catalog throughout the year. Our new system is universal, works on almost all GPUs (really old ones might be out of luck), is not locked to a given manufacturer, and is not locked to PC!

 
With update 22.20.0, Warframe’s Nvidia PhysX particles have been removed and replaced with a new “GPU Particles” option, offering players Off/Low/Medium/High/LUDICROUS options. Below is an example of these new particles in action.