Installation

PhysX is installed as part of the standard Isaac Lab installation. It runs through NVIDIA Isaac Sim’s Omniverse Kit runtime, so Isaac Sim is a required dependency for the PhysX backend.

Follow the Local Installation guide for the full installation procedure. The short version:

1. Install Isaac Sim 6.0 (binary install or pip install — see the Isaac Sim documentation for system requirements).

2. Clone Isaac Lab and run ./isaaclab.sh -i to install the Isaac Lab extensions on top of Isaac Sim.

No extra packages are required for the PhysX backend specifically — the PhysX runtime ships with Isaac Sim.

Testing the Installation

To verify the PhysX backend is working, run any classic Isaac Lab task with the default preset:

./isaaclab.sh -p scripts/environments/zero_agent.py --task Isaac-Cartpole-v0 --num_envs 128

The default preset on most tasks resolves to PhysX. You can also pass presets=physx explicitly on tasks that declare multi-backend physics presets.