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]

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After Nvidia picked up PhysX, it was obvious ATI would probably get left out of Nvidia's efforts to spread the love to graphics cards and x86 CPUs (hence ATI hooking up with Havok). (Physics engines, for the uninitiated, are what make your body bounce around with aplomb after getting stuck with a grenade in Halo 3.) But some modders have fixed that and ported PhysX to ATI's Radeon 3800 cards, instantly improving benchmarks.

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We knew it was coming, and now it appears that NVIDIA's acquisition of PhysX maker Ageia is about to pay off. NVIDIA has told analysts that that the conversion of Ageia's physics application interface to CUDA is nearly complete—so if you are running GeForce 8000+ you will soon be able to enjoy the benefits of a physics accelerator via a simple software download.

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