At the Computex show in Taiwan, ATI announced their physics acceleration solution based around their Crossfire technology. Rather than utilize existing shaders (as nVidia will implement for their Havok solution) and instead of implementing a PCI card (like Ageia does with their PhysX solution,) ATI will allow gamers to add either a second or third ATI X1000 series card to their system and dedicate one video card to physics rendering through asymmetric processing. Gamers who already have two video cards implemented in a Crossfire rendering configuration could add another X1000 series card to their system to dedicate to physics rendering.

One interesting thing is that gamers who are looking to upgrade their Crossfire capable systems, but only have one video card, can add a second card, and use the more powerful for graphics rendering, while the older card could be used for physics rendering.

This gives a cost advantage over the Ageia solution, since the PhysX card is dedicated to physics processing and is a fixed price, but given the speed at which GPUs drop in price, the ATI cards will become more economical, faster. The only thing left out of ATI’s announcement are benchmarks, but given the state of gaming and existing support for physics processing, it isn’t surprising that there wasn’t a specific game demo shown.

Read More | HardOCP