Ageias PhysX processor will bring better physics to computer games, but will you buy it?
Today’s top-shelf computer games look pretty stunning, especially when you run them using a PC with a powerful graphics chip and a speedy processor. But you have to admit: Even the best games still don’t look completely realistic. From the way explosions appear to the way water flows to the way a character falls down, there’s still something less than real about it. You know what I’m talking about. You pop a bad guy and he falls down, but the way he falls just doesn’t look quite right. The folks at a company named Ageia says the missing element is real-world physics, and they want you to add a third processor–yep, a physics processing unit–to your PC. The PPU would let game developers add more physics processing to their games. Of course, many of today’s games already employ some physics calculations, but the number of objects to which most game developers actually apply it is limited. That’s because physics computations are processor intensive, and throwing too many of these calcula
