ageia is making a physx chip that helps with the physics and stuff. i was reading a review and it said that it has its own processor so it relives the cpu or something, allowing it to focus on the ai, which makes the physics better. it sounded kinda cool, and the demos were nice. i think its a neat idea.

It sounds neat but it has no chance of survival. Dual-core processors have a whole lot of extra processing power that can be used for physics without the additional overhead (PCI bandwidth, synchronization) of a separate physics card. Furthermore, investing in a dual-core processor benefits much more than just the physics in a few games. The Ageia cards are quite expensive and will rarely be used.

Besides, no game developer in his right mind would create a game that will only run on a fraction of PCs. So there always has to be a fallback without affecting gameplay. It took graphics cards about three years to become widespread, but by the time physics play a key role in games the CPUs will be multi-core with highly improved architectures...

gotta disagree, at least somewhat. in the same way you dont want to be using a dual core processor for rasterizing triangles and running shader code, dual cores will never be as efficient or be able to run as many operations per second as a dedicated card (case in point...low cost physx chip handily beats the fastest of single cpus available today). furthermore the overhead is nothing compared to graphics work and the synch work would have to be done anyway if the physics was running in another thread.

the main thing will just be market penetration. the nice thing is that the aegia lib automatically uses the card if it is found, so you arent preventing people from running the game. the bad thing is that means that the extra physics power cant be used to affect gameplay (though there are a few situations you could get away with this in single player, and it could benifit games like second life where physics calcs take place on the server). however, there are a quite a few people willing to pay $250 for just a bit more eye candy (see alienware for even more egregious examples)...just see the lengths people go for a few more fps; offloading all physics calcs could be a significant jump.

i'm not one of those people now, but the first killer app (some cool unreal engine 3 app for instance) or bring it down $100 or so and i might jump on board without a second thought.