Hot! Electronics - The Cool Stuff

BFG Technologies has announced the launch of it's physics cards based on the AGEIA PhysX chip for the 9. of May (that's in 4 days!). The BFG card is so expected to be the first physics card on the market. It should be interesting to track how this release sells, and to see how the competition answers to this all-new technology.
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If your not into computer gaming, here's a litle explanation:
The idea behind the physics card is to take some load of the CPU durring the ever-more demanding PC games. The physics cards could be a revolution just as the 3D graphycs were about 10 years ago. The point is to have a seperate processor optimized for handling real-time physical calculations (trajectories, forces, gravity, mass...) in addition the graphics processor, we all have in our graphics cards, and the CPU, so the three combined can simulate virtual reality worlds in games to the details not possible untill now.
I imagine that physics cards will in time find their uses in proffesional simulations as well because of their processors (PPU - Physics Processing Unit) special optimizations.


The first BFG version will in adition to the specialized processor (PPU) have a 128bit memmory bus with 128MB of high speed GDDR3 memmory. The card will reqire a 1.4GHz CPU and 128MB RAM to run propperly and will fit a standard PCI slot.

The game developers have allready accepted this new feature, and the upcoming games that will support the PhysX cards have been announced, games like:
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, Unreal Tournament 2007, Warhammer MMORPG.

The official price has not yet been announced but is estemated at around $300