Physics Cards

From TheBestCaseScenario

A physics card is an add on card that takes on the processing burden of processing in game physics off the CPU. Currently There is only one Physics card available in the market. The PhysX available from AGEIA which is been manufactured and sold by BFG Technologies, ASUS and ELSA.

While the two main graphics card companies NVIDIA and ATI are offering development kits these only allow in game physics processing to be offloaded to the GPU. The other main competitor of the PhysX card is the Havok FX software which is used in more than 150 games and only off loads some of the physics calculations as Shader Model 3.0 instructions to the GPU for processing.

The PhysX card released in 2006 runs on the PCI interface and has a 128mb of on board memory. It has an on board processing unit in this case a PPU (Physics Processing Unit). The PhysX is available for sale around the $140 US mark.