Thought I'd better hype this up and get people drooling, since this is meant to be released this month!

Basically, the Ageia Physx Processor (or Physx Processor Unit, PPU) is a special peice of hardware dedicated to performing physics calculations in computer games.

Why is it needed?

Well, we've seen some pretty good physics systems in the past few years. Notably, Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 used an OK physics engine. Pariah, based on Unreal Tournament, used the Havok physics engine. Half Life 2 used a similar engine (this was always good fun in the deathmatch mode, or in CounterStrike). But the type of thing that Ageia are aiming for is... when you throw a grenade in to a building, you will literally see all the bricks exploding out, wood shattering, and exploding objects colliding with each other, causing more damage. An example on there website is:

[quote:d74e6c67d3]A Drop of Liquid is calculated for wind velocity, adjusted for gravity and accelerated as it nears the ground below. As it hits, it splatters and droplets splash in multiple directions.
(all while your battle rages in the foreground)
REPEAT a THOUSAND TIMES
IN REAL TIME.....[/quote:d74e6c67d3]

Obviously, your CPU and GPU alone can't cope with things like this. Thus, the Ageia Physx Processor is on its way!!

There's more news on the Ageia (.com) website, there are also some video demo's available, and if you download the SDK, make sure to check out the included demo's with it - an especially fun one is called "Pyramid With Dudes", which basically offers you a triangle of bricks and a human like figure to chuck in to them. A good video demo is the Airtight demo, where a plane crashes in to a building full of boxes and bombs and other weird shrapnelly type objects. It's very fluid, and very realistic.

We're to expect a lot of fun things like this in the future. And of course, as processing power improves over the years, we'll see even more true-to-life animations than ever!!!!

Over the years we've seen PCs become more modular. To begin with we only had a Processor (CPU). When graphics started advancing, they developed a more streamlined processor for handling graphics alone - the GPU. Now games are developing advanced physics, the humble CPU cannot handle it anymore, therefore we need a new type of processor - the PPU!

The PPU is designed to only handle physics, meaning it can handle much more than a processor would - i think it's about 100x as much.

Now that the CPU has had a burden taken off it, it will allow fr more bots and stuff in single player, due to more available processing power.

Multithreaded apps are already being written to use the processing power of the GPU in 2D mode, to give your computer a boost when not in games, I expect we'll see this for the PPU aswell, meaning computers are again faster.

I'm looking forward to throwing a grenade at something, missing, blowing up a wall sending bricks flying into the enemy and lots of stuff that can't be scripted.

[size=18:e8a2d9cf0b]Bring on [i:e8a2d9cf0b]Physx[/i:e8a2d9cf0b]![/size:e8a2d9cf0b]