My random thoughts on the physics accelerator..
1) It sounds awesome and obviosuly it would make gaming a lot more fun and more realistic.
2) I hope they come up with one solution that will become standard and supported by all vendors (not another X vs. Y war) and that this will be built into either video cards, chipsets or whatever because as a $300 add-on card this will not survive long. Because in order to make games take full advantage of it, these games would have to rquire it, they wouldn't be playable without the graphics coprocessor. Most likely the gameplay will rely on modifiable environments and advanced physics and won't be playable without. You can't scale this down the way yo can scale graphics between different levels of video card performance. So, how many game developers will be brave enough to release a game that requires a $300 add on? Or they will need two versions of the game. So, this has to be cheaper and it has to become a standard or it'll die.
3) It may turn out that if quad-core CPUs with math coprocessors arrive there won't be that much need for dedicated physics processor. Even though it'll be faster that even the fatest general purpose CPU the economics will decide here.
4) Despite he fact that this sounds excting, I wouldn't jump on it too soon, don't want to end up with a $300 piece of hardware that won't even serve well as a paperwight. There must be strong game support for it.
I read somewhere that ageia have said that the processor can be incorporated into other devices such as motherboards and graphics cards. Wouldnt it be better to just buy it once though? Instead of having to buy it seperately loads of times.
Either way i cant see it being integrated for a while simply because of the cost of it, its a little to expensive to do that at the moment.
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