You guys are making an assumption that the geforce cards will be be able to accelerate physics better than Aegia's custom processor. All this talk about 8800GTs screaming performance in physics, a card that was primarily designed for graphics processing, Im gonna laugh when performances falls well below the hype, enjoy your sli setups... People have bashed Aegia a lot about their hardware, but its an extremely opimized engine specifically made for one purpose. Geforce cards will be effectively "emulating" this architecture, something tells me it will turn out a LOT slower.

Interesting that some people are apparently willing to spend $ on a second (slower) graphics card to run physics, but not to spend similar money on a physics card - is the thinking that the 2nd graphics card could help with graphics for non-physics games?

What has happened so far is that nVidia has purchased Ageia.

Implementation of any existing Ageia tech into CUDA is yet to come. When that happens, if that happens, it will be optional for game developers, as opposed to something game developers will *have to* support (game devs have to support an API, for instance.) Should nVidia implement such support as a nVidia-only feature, then game developers who want to support all DX-capable cards in the market probably will not choose to use it. Of course, this won't stop nVidia from marketing it as if everything everything already *does* use it...;) Judging by some posts in this thread--like the UT3 post, for instance--some people think it's already happened, and the advantage to nVidia marketing in picking up the Ageia name becomes obvious...;)

Ok! My question is: does this mean I can use two similar, but not identical, Nvidia graphics cards in an X38 chipset board - where one of the graphics cards is handling the graphics and the second is handling the physics?

See I have an 8800GTS/640 (Yeah I know it's "old"!), and I have an Asus P5E motherboard with two PCIE 2.0 slots. This means I can't do "SLi", then again I've never been terribly impressed with SLi. But I might be interested in buying say an 8600GTS. Either to run a second display, or to perform Physics processing.

Until they can actually demonstrate a top-tier game where this tech adds something substantial that can't be accomplished in software, this is gonna remain a niche only filled by fanboys and people who can afford to drop $1200 for three graphics cards at the same time.

I simply can't imagine a gaming scenario where using a second card for physics instead of faster rendering (SLI) would make sense.

I still say it's mostly for their GPU Computing stuff...

I think some of you are missing a few things here: There is a potential to merge these features on a SINGLE DIE. I cannot imagine nVidia requiring another entire video card to be dedicated simply to Physics. This is how I see it:
nVidia has some optimized math paths which can be used for either graphics or general purpose accelerated math within the die, now slap in the Ageia IP in conjunction with what nVidia already has, and the GP math is now complimented with physics-specific math accelerator functions. As far as design flow, it would make more sense for a single silicon piece to contain this functionality. Now nVidia can leverage some of the Ageia code already written to complement the video drivers and their dev package.

Now however since each die can perform both tasks, you can then optimize your configuration by adding another card, and "almost" double the performance of graphics and physics.

This is good news. I've already got two GTS-640s clocked at 630/1500/2000, but my S939 Opteron 185 @3.0GHz is bottlenecking the crap out of them (except in Crysis). Turning one of them to do physics seems like a really good idea.

Finally a use for me for the second PCIe x16 slot! I'm pretty content with single card graphics solutions for graphics but I would likely buy a mid-low range graphics card at ~$100 for physics, especially if I could then use it for additional displays when using the desktop. Even better would be picking up a used GPU on the cheap.

I wonder how much this plays into having an integrated GPU built into all future chipsets... even if you add a discrete GPU, you still have a GPU on the motherboard that could be used for physics calculations. Before too long everyone will suddenly have hardware physics capability even if they didn't mean to buy it.

Brilliant.

I could care less about physics... but if I can get some nice OGR, RC5, or even F@H performance on an nVidia card, THAT would be compelling enough to get me to buy one!!!

I'm glad Nvidia bought Ageia because they are the ideal company to get GPU physics acceleration into mainstream gaming. I'm also glad they are working toward open standards for GPU physics, because that will remove any reservations on the part of game developers.

Lastly, I'm looking forward to the possibility that one day soon I may use my motherboard's IGP chip to run physics. :)

I am so happy with this news, my 2 8800GTshould be more than enough to let me enjoy UT3 in full glory now.

My guess (and objection) is that this will be pretty negative for performance and that there will be few options for disabling physics processing like there are for graphics options. With that said, I hope Nvidia works this so that a single GPU can deal with both physics and graphics processing as the application requires, so that PhysX-enabled applications can (hopefully) throttle their physics processing demands to maintain a level of graphics performance. I do not want a situation where I buy a second graphics card for SLI and I'm forced to make that a 'physics' card while my first one is the only one doing 'graphics' card work.

This PhySX wont do any performance gain except more visual effects for a price.

#3, It is Nvidia's trying attempt to indirectly pushed for SLI = more video card sells.

I've read this four times now and still have no idea what you're trying to say.

physX is yesterday, Microsoft's DirectX Direct Physics API which allows universal physics acceleration is yet to come. At least I hope it'll come someday and nullify this physX monstrosity.

at least they're not going to be like Creative and force you to buy it like ALchemy for Audigy cards.

Although free physx is always nice, I gotta disagree with Huang about his "encourage people to buy a second GPU" comment. It's still gimicky, and I'm not willing to give up other expansion slots (tv tuner, sound card, wi-fi) for some physics.

So buying something like an 8600gt would be useful as a secondary card, which you can get for under 100.

I wonder how much performance of physics scales with the faster (I mean, more expensive) cards though.

File this under obvious.

That said, the implementation through CUDA is pretty smart stuff. Maybe physics engines will get much more sophisticated in the coming years.

i was right! i was right! la lala la laaaaa!

*poof* Ageia is accepted by the masses. *sigh*

Hey, theres a slick way to up the video cards price another $50+ !!! That may even pay off the acquisition in a couple of years. Gotta hand it to Nv for making it plainly obvious to us gamers what we really need to make our games better !!

Wonder how this will impact performance...