Ageia PhysX was supposed to bring a whole new dimension to video games. Unfortunately, the physics accelerator wasn’t embraced by many game developers. Moreover, NVIDIA and ATI claimed that they could easily handle elaborated physics instructions. This was supposed to be possible if a high-end graphics card was to be paired with a low-end one that could act like a Physics Processing Unit. Ultimately, Ageia was bought by NVIDIA and people thought that this technology will be slowly buried. Unlike many NVIDIA takeovers that only concentrated on eliminating the competition, this time, it looks like NVIDIA really wants to continue what Ageia started several years ago.

Fudzilla informs that it has been confirmed by high ranked NVIDIA executives that a PhysX driver for the Geforce 8 and 9 GPUs will come a few weeks after the official release of the GTX 280 and 260 cards. As you might know by now, these two flagship cards are about to be launched next week. That means that he PhysX driver will follow a few weeks after, some time in July. The physics functions will be supported via the CUDA architecture.

Additionally, it seems that all PhysX enabled games that have been launched in the past couple of years, including GRAW and Unreal tournament 3 will work with PhysX over GPU and you won't need Ageia card anymore to get the benefits. NVIDIA claims that there will even be performance gains over the Ageia cards.