A nice bit of news for once from the world of graphics cards and hefty expense…

Despite the fact that no-one you know bought a PhysX card, if you’re a PC gamer with a relatively recent NVIDIA card, you’ve already got one. Or, at least, you will soon. Spooks.

[From NVIDIA, CUDA and PhysX Article // PC /// Eurogamer]

If you have something like a GeForce 8800 or higher, you will be getting much better ragdolls in your games, as a portion of your graphics card’s… err… graphical processing… can be given over to running physics simulations. We’re probably going to lose a bit of graphical oomph (a tiny bit, not a huge chunk) but at least we will see things happening on screen more realistically, gravity-wise.

The same article from Eurogamer also notes that when you upgrade your card, you could potentially (if you have a motherboard that can do it, anyway) dedicate your old card to physics stuff and your new card to just visuals. Fantastic, although the people I hand my old video cards down to will not be happy…