NVIDIA and Ageia bringing you PhysX accelerators on all 8000+ series cards

Its been a lot of work, but Ageia has finished porting over their technology from a stand-alone API to CUDA so it can run on NVIDIA's GeForce 8000 series and up cards. It's still going through Quality Assurance, but after that your NVIDIA card will double as a Physics Accelerator for your games, of which over 140 are supported or in development.

Ageia is hoping that this hard work will pay off by taking their user base from roughly 150k to more than 8 million. Suggestions are not to try it on anything less than an 8800 if you really want to see a difference, but it will supposedly be available on all 8000 and 9000 series cards.

One of the goals of this is to prove to the spokesperson from Intel that said graphics cards might not be necessary in the future that they are, in fact, necessary. NVIDIA has already proved it by running a similar demo as the one that Intel showed on their Nehalem chips, but NVIDIA used about 5k more particles than were present in Intel's demo and then ran it at 300fps instead of the meager 15-20 that the Nehalem chips were running it at. Speculation is that with this new Physics update and the new Cores NVIDIA is working on they could run the demo at upwards of 600fps showing that processor of today are still 20-40x slower than graphics cards of today at running graphics/physics applications.

[via TGDaily]