The November issue of Popular Science has its candidates for science and technology products of the year, and one of their computing products caught my eye.

First off, yes, I read Popular Science and refer to it as ‘PopSci’ in conversation, so let’s get all the giggling and nerd jokes out of the way first.

Ready? Good. The item in discussion is the PhysX Processor from Ageia technologies. This new card is designed to be the first processor totally dedicated to offloading physics calculations from the CPU. Ageia claims that this relief will bring about a revolution in gaming parallel to the one caused by the development of the dedicated graphics processor. Whether or not the mob is lighting the torches yet is up to debate, but the software capacities of the processor (a package referred to as PhysX SDK) are available in Unreal 3. There are some interesting videos that show off the capabilities of the card, and if the video’s are rendered real-time then I stand impressed at the sheer number of objects it handles.

While the idea of separating physics calculations from the processor sounds like a good idea, it also sounds like another hole in the computer for me to toss money into. It hurts me to spend hundreds of dollars on a good video card; does this mean I’m going to have to spend hundreds on a physics card, too?