New hardware dedicated to physics computations to bring new level of realism to games.
Your games are about to get a lot more interactive. Fabless semiconductor company Ageia has today announced PhysX, the world"s first physics processing unit. The PhysX chip is a dedicated physics processing engine designed to coexist with the CPU and the GPU in existing desktop systems.
When you think of cutting-edge physics in today"s games, you think rag-doll character effects, which allow character corpses to flop around in a realistic manner, and unique weapons like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, which lets players pick up objects and toss them around. Gamers may marvel over current physics effects, but Ageia cofounder and CEO Manju Hegde sees only "mundane" game environments full of limitations.