Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced today that all GeForce 8 graphics cards will soon be able to run PhysX.
The revelation was made during a Q and A session following Nvidia's fourth-quarter financial results conference call.
Huang revealed that Nvidia is currently working on porting PhysX to CUDA. CUDA, short for Compute Unified Device Architecture, is an application programming interface created by Nvidia to let programmers write general-purpose applications which would run on GPU.
All existing GeForce 8 cards support CUDA and, according to Nvidia's CEO, will be able to run PhysX once the porting is complete.
"We're working toward the physics-engine-to-CUDA port as we speak. And we intend to throw a lot of resources at it. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it helps our GPU sales even in advance of [the port's completion]. The reason is, [it's] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes", said Jen-Hsun Huang. "Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA"
"Our expectation is that this is gonna encourage people to buy even better GPUs. It might-and probably will-encourage people to buy a second GPU for their SLI slot. And for the highest-end gamer, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs. Potentially two for graphics and one for physics, or one for graphics and two for physics."
Mr. Huang refused to chart out a specific release date for the first PhysX port.