Dedicated graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia used to be critical just for gamers and pros, but now they do a lot more than make splattered guts look good. Like make video transcoding really fast.
Rumours of imminent high fail rates notwithstanding, today’s a pretty good day to own any GeForce 8 series or higher desktop graphics card, since they all get PhysX support with a free download (three PhysX-juiced UT3 maps are free too). Also tapping the CUDA goodness is badaboom, an insanely fast video transcoder, Folding@Home and a couple of tech demos–Nvidia showed me the Fluids demo on a GTX 280, and it was pretty neat. I’m snagging this stuff right now, actually. [Nvidia]
