With the arrival of Nvidia's new RTX 50 series, we had to say goodbye to PhysX 32-bit support. This is a pain if you want to play older games that rely on the technology, as your performance will be pretty abysmal. Fortunately, a Redditor has found a solution: install a second GPU that supports PhysX and have it do all of the heavy lifting. Genius.

Someone paired up a 3050 with a 5090 to run their older games

In a post on the Nvidia subreddit, user jerubedo revealed their master plan. Because the 5090 doesn't support 32-bit PhysX, the key was to install 3050 in tandem. The older GPU would handle all of the PhysX calculations, while the 5090 took care of the graphics.

It may seem weird to rely on an older GPU to get good performance in some pretty old games, but as jerubedo demonstrates with his tests, the lack of support for PhysX with the 5090 really doesn't do these titles any favors. He details all of the results of his testing in the original post, but here's a snippet to show you just how important that 3050 was for getting a decent framerate:

Mafia II Classic results:

Benchmark run without the 3050 and max settings: 28.8 FPS

Benchmark run with the 3050 and max settings: 157.1 FPS

Screenshots: Imgur: Mafia II

Batman Arkham Asylum results:

Benchmark run without the 3050 and max settings: 61 FPS (but with MANY of the scenes in the low 30s and 40s)

Benchmark run with the 3050 and max settings: 390 FPS

Screenshots: Imgur: Arkham Asylum

It's a pretty unexpected thing to consider before buying the RTX 50 series. If you're a big fan of the classics, you may want to hang onto that older GPU purely for the 32-bit PhysX support. Otherwise, you, too, may need to perform this interesting setup just to get your games running at a playable state.