Prepare to open your wallets even more:
http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-17585-1998-x-x-x
Quote:
The PhysX chip will be the first hardware-based physics processing unit (PPU) released for the PC platform. Physics-accelerated games will be able to offload physics calculations from the CPU to the PPU much like how 3D-accelerated games process graphics on a video card.
This will allow games to use effects like fluid dynamics or cloth simulation and to create gameworlds where a player can interact with tens of thousands of objects instead of only 20 or 30.
While the final board specs will be decided by the manufacturer, the Ageia reference board design will include 128MB of GDDR3 memory. Initial boards will be PCI-compatible, but PCI Express versions will follow afterward. Retail boards should appear in the October time frame and should sell in the high-$200 range.
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