It seems that NVIDIA has finally decided to make APEX available for broader audience.

UPDATE: NVIDIA APEX 1.0 Beta released

Main APEX page on Developer Website was updated with following statement

APEX 1.0 beta provides access to APEX Destruction and Clothing. The NVIDIA APEX 1.0 (beta) tools and binary SDK are 100% free and can be used in both commercial and non-commercial projects. APEX is available for immediate download by all registered PhysX developers.

So, APEX Clothing and APEX Destruction modules are about to be released with authoring tools (new 3ds Max/Maya plug-ins and PhysXLab) and APEX runtime SDK (with all docs and tutorials) – this mean that developers will gain the ability to freely integrate APEX into their engines.

According to our sources, APEX 1.0 Beta release will happen this week (despite of quoted text above, it is not yet available).

Update: PhysXLab Beta was released, the rest will follow soon.

Update #2: New PhysX plug-ins for 3ds Max and Maya are released