LaggyKar

Yes, it says so in the first paragraph

Still doesn’t allow background playback though, so it’s useless to me

I don’t think there has ever been a PPU on the GPU. It did originally run on PPU cards by Ageia, but AFAIK PhysX on GPU:s used CUDA GPGPU right from the start.

Mirror’s Edge actually had a place with tons of broken glass falling down, where the framerate would drop into the single digits if it used CPU PhysX. I remember that because it shipped with an outdated PhysX library that would run on the CPU even though I had an Nvidia GPU, so I had to delete the game’s PhysX library to force it to use the version from the graphics driver, in order to get it to playable performance. If you didn’t have an Nvidia driver you would need to disable PhysX for that segment to be playable.