Physx is still used in a lot of games, just not hardware accelerated Physx.
Physx has been an essential part of Hairworks/Gameworks for some time now, and there are tons of titles utilizing hardware-accelerated particle effects, fluid dynamics, cloth, hair, flex effects etc. The only reason we don't hear about it, is because all reviewers disable anything platform-bound for testing, and regular people disable it for the sake of better performance (frames over eye-candy). Basically everyone pretends PhysX does not exist.
Realistic audio engine, I beg you devs.
It's already here. Few months ago there was a demo on YT of a new path-traced audio engine (RTX-based). I think it's already streamlined into VRWorks and exists as a plugin for UE4.
I remember when 'flag physics' on good old ageia drivers had me looking and playing with just that for a few hours. I remember how Borderlands and Warframe impressed me big time with particle physics.
What we really need, is more games that use destructible environments and interactive objects. Assuming you've tried Cellfactor on your PPU, you know what I'm talking about.
The closest we've got these days, is some obscure Microsoft-backed title which runs destruction on the Azure cloud. Can't even remember the name of it...
Agreed. Seriously under-utilized. If NVidia had been smart they would have licensed the PhysX IP to all GPU makers and made it an industry standard feature set.
I think after many versions and iterations PhysX is too CUDA-dependent. Plus, we already know that AMD and NVidia have very different ideas about Async Compute and workload balancing.
Our only hope is Vulkan rewrite of Bullet, but even with that it still lacks lots of features, including ease of integration with popular game engines.