An enthusiast installed NVIDIA RTX 3050 as a PhysX accelerator for RTX 5090 — 157 FPS instead of 28 FPS in Mafia 2

The unexpected abandonment of PhysX 32-bit in RTX 50 leads to a significant slowdown in some games. The player used an NVIDIA RTX 3050 as a PhysX accelerator along with an RTX 5090.

On Reddit, jerubedo writes that he bought an NVIDIA RTX 3050 graphics card specifically for PhysX rendering to properly enjoy some old games he runs from time to time. It became the second video card in the system, where «first fiddle» RTX 5090 plays.

The player chose the compact RTX 3050 6GB because of its consumption of only 75W dc from PCI-E and because it «does not clutter up the case with additional power cables». Zotac’s SFF model also comes in a half-length form factor, so it doesn’t interfere too much with the RTX 5090’s air cooling. The tester cites dramatic results from using the optional PhysX accelerator in games.

• In Mafia II Classic, it got 157.1 FPS at maximum settings instead of 28.8 FPS with the RTX 5090 alone.
• Batman Arkham Asylum without 3050 ran at 61 FPS, «but with many scenes with low 30 and 40 frames», with 3050 the frame rate soared to 390 FPS.
• In Borderlands 2, without 3050 «, I couldn’t enable PhysX at all» (probably to test it on 5090), and with 3050 I got 122 FPS.
• In Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, we couldn’t enable PhysX in either mode, and the game showed relatively low 62 FPS in both cases.
• In Mirror’s Edge, player «broke several windows of» and got 12 FPS for 49 seconds after the break. WITH 3050 — 171 FPS.

The RTX 3050 could not be used to run newer games with PhysX 64-bit, despite the selection in the NVIDIA control panel — the games would throw the PhysX load to the RTX 5090 anyway. Several of these games demonstrated PhysX, but none of them loaded the 3050. The user believes this to be a bug and is hoping to test the difference between running PhysX directly on the 5090 and offloading it using the 3050 with modern titles.

Additionally, we are publishing two other YouTube tests that clearly demonstrate games on video cards with and without PhysX 32-bit. It is significant that in some cases even the GeForce GTX 980 Ti significantly outperforms the NVIDIA RTX 5090 in terms of performance.