I’ve been living under a rock as far as the forums are concerned .
Just now I found the following thread
what are the legal factors involved in this , as long as I know all those the gameworks technologies are owned by nvidia . How can somebody just integrate their libraries and redistribute it ?
does UE4/EPIC has a special deal with Nvidia for its users or something?
Just to make one thing clear, I didnt write the integrations, NVIDIA did and they provide them for everyone to use, you can follow their integrations here: https://github.com/NvPhysX/UnrealEngine
All I have done is merged them all together into a single branch and provided to the people (as well as adding my own personal touches and improvements). The same level of access is required to access my branch as it does NVIDIAs. Primarily you need to have an Epic account and it needs to be liked to your github account.
Some of NVIDIAs techs are available to be used free of charge in your commercial or non commercial games (The ones available as integrations, also some that are not yet such as Volumetric Lighting, Flow, etc.) But not all of them are as of yet, over time they will release more and more for us to use.
In that case why haven’t epic added the integration themselves in stock release builds for free technologies? I take its because some of them might be performance heavy and targeted to a specific use-cases than general ones.
That and they are not cross platform solutions, currently they are only integrated for Windows DX11 (Exception being VXGI which has DX12 as well). Most of the techs support other platforms, just the integrations haven’t been written for those other platforms as of yet. And for FLEX its even more restrictive, requiring a Cuda 3.0 compatible or higher card (Which ties it to NVIDIA only as far as I am aware, however they are working on a Direct Compute version which will open up consoles and AMD)