To the non-gamer, this likely means next to nothing. But to the hardcore gaming maniac, details like Game Physics are key to a good gaming experience. Seriously just ask around at E3 sometime…

Early in March of 2005, a fairly small startup company called Ageia announced that it would build and market a chip to accelerate physics calculations for games. We followed the technology with editorials and E3 demos always maintaining the attitude that “physics in games is neat and hardware acceleration could bring it to the next level, but we’ll reserve judgment until we have the final product.”

Of course, a lot has happened since that initial announcement. Ageia bought a software physics solution called Novodex and made it their own. They grew the company to over a hundred developers, working on dramatically improving their software solution and hardware. Epic Games chose the PhysX middleware as the core physics implementation in Unreal Engine 3 (licensed for so many future top games it’s getting hard to count). Ageia made the PhysX middleware—even the software-based stuff—freefor developers willing to support their acceleration chip. Meanwhile Havok has been working with video card manufacturers to provide physics acceleration with any Shader Model 3.0–capable card.

Now, you can finally buy the card from both BFG and ASUS, and it’ll set you back almost 300 bones. Game support is, shall we say, extremely slim right now, but the list of future titles is long and distinguished….. Source ExtremeTech

[tags]video card,game,physx,accelerate,physics[/tags]