PHYSICS CARD!!!!
The Physics Card (or PPU, physocs processing unit) was first made by AGIEA in its SDK designed PhysX card. It takes the burden of deciding the movement of individual particles in a game, like water, fog, dirt from the CPU, allowing the game to do amazing things with these effects. It also calculates objects speed relative to its wieght, and its stopping distance, as well as simpler things, like gravity. It is much like a GPU in that respect, but for Physics, not Graphics. Aegia claims that its PhysX card can process physics(moving objects, water, steam, ect) 100 times faster than an average CPU. It can be fitted to any standard PCI slot. In order to program a game with PhysX physics, use Dark Basic Pro
However, ATI has built into one of its GPU(graphics processing unit) Radeon X1600, its own PPU. However, this may be cheaper, but it doesn't process as fast as a dedicated PPU. However, this seemes to have failed, as ATI hasn't advistisec a PPU on any of its latest GPUs. And besides, who would pick a Radeon over a Geforce? The Geforce 7950 has 1 Gigabyte of video RAM. Mmmmmm.....
Also, Nvidia has annouced that its new Forceware 90 drives will allow the 2nd card in an SLI link to be used as a PPU. However, it will only do visual physics, not the hidden ones, like gravity and inertia. Also, the additional debries generated by explosions will not remain forever.
Pics and Videos
Stats and Specs
SupportedTitles
Rendering a scene
PhysX API
FAQs
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Tom's hardware, also install guide
wikipedia
AEGIA
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