And best of all, you don't NEED to use acceleration to enjoy Havok's engine.

Poor, poor, stupid AGEIA

Now that would be pretty cool. If you can just use an old video card (well within the x1***/7*** generation) for physics, I could see that increasing more widespread adoption.

There was an article about a month ago that stated you could mix and match NVIDIA cards to run the Havok engine.

I somehow doubt outfitting your computer with a second graphics card will even come close to the kind of performance you would see on a PhysX card (even with a high end card like a x1800/1900 the difference in computations are extreme). That wouldn't even be worth it money wise, to begin with. I'm guessing the lower end cards won't fair better then the high end ones either.

If I was really hell bent on not purchasing a PhysX card I would think it would be more cost effective to purchase a processer with a second core then it would be to do this. Second cores cost what, $50-100 depending on the model and provide quite a bit more firepower then even a high end graphics card and you don't need to reserve the entire thing for physics!

So I finally bought Half Life 2. I've really enjoyed the gravity gun and the ability to interact realisitcally with objects in the environment. To replace physics that affects how you interact with the game with physics that only enables eye-candy would be a big step in the wrong direction. It would be like coming out with a product that makes cutscenes look better, but not the game itself.

*waits for physics to atcually make a difference*

If I could setup a X1600 for physics, not spend $300 on it, maybe it almost makes sense!

The best thing about this is the card will be that it would be on 16X speed .... So games are not going to be slow as on AGIEA .... which is on poor pci mode.. Good customer are the winner

ATI here has a good advantage (mix and match)