Installation

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 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:

uv run python scripts/environments/zero_agent.py --task Isaac-Cartpole --num_envs 128

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

Environments whose previous default was automatic PhysX selection now use the concrete isaacsim_physx variant by default. Existing explicit defaults, such as Newton, remain unchanged. Pass physics=physx explicitly to opt into automatic PhysX-family selection between Isaac Sim PhysX and OvPhysX on tasks that support both.