"More importantly, the new ForceWare driver is expanding PhysX support to all currently available PhysX titles on the market, including Ghost Recon 2: Advanced Warfighter, Warmonger and Cell Factor: Revolution."

I think This is the most interesting part of that news

This is excellent news in general, the 177.66 betas have demonstrated much needed stability and performance so far and the extension of features to existing software is certainly a great thing.

No doubt they will ask you to remove any previous physics software completely from your system first before you can get the included PhysX features to work properly.

I just hope the performance is as good as, if not better than the previous beta and also that it will be released including PhysX drivers as a single download/installer package, rather than any seperate driver/software packages.

Are people serious about this ???

Obviously with Quadcores becoming popular, most games won't use more than two cores. So AMD want's to use the "free" cores for Havok. And if it makes sense, outsource more work to the GPU.

Nvidias PhysX is for the GPU only and this solution forces the GPU to calculate PhysX and the graphics at the same time. Obviously the more of one thing has to be calculated, the less of the other can be done. This means that resolution, eyecandy, amount of polygons etc. will change how much PhysX will be possible. At certain resolutions is has already been shown that e.g. a GeForce 9800 GTX can't do any PhysX at all, because it's fully loaded with gfx work.

Taking one or two cores of a quadcore (or maybe even one of a dual core) for those calculations will secure constantly available performance regarding those calculations. Guess what programmers will prefer?

thx god for this

Or use an old 8,9 or GTX......to do Physx ........or equivalent Radeon ..... plus isn't ATI putting havok on their GPU's as well.......
As a consumer who has already seen the titles come out for both physics engines, i would like to know that i can use both and am not locked into anything.....otherwise I might as well buy consoles.....

screw consoles, the havok method does make more sense, i would rather dedicate a core then a whole card to physics, regardless, physics is more of a gimic right now and will probably remain so for quite some time, i doubt there will be any physics titles anytime in the near future

I agree with you, but I would rather use an unused core on my CPU than buy an extra graphics card to do my physx . Either way ATI will have an advantage here if Reg can pull off his Radeon Physx stunt as then ATI cards will be able to do Havok and Physx.

This is quite a good idea I think, if most games can only use 2/3 cores then it makes more sense to use a "spare core" to process physics which will then leave the GPU more free resources to process the graphix. - However this would only be best for PCs with 3/4 core CPU.

If you have only dual core CPU it probably makes more sense to let the GPU handle physics. - it would be cool if the graphics drivers gave those of us with quad core CPUs the choice to enable the first option.

P.S I am waiting for 5th August like its Christmas

Physx is done so much better on the highly parallel GPU architecture than it is on the CPU...much the same as graphics is better done on the GPU than the CPU which it was once many moons ago....obviously physx on gpu will hit the frame rates and I personaly would prefer to use a card dedicated to physx and separate from the graphics set up.

Do you have some sort of magic cloak that protects you from bottlenecks?

Sorry dont understand what you mean....I understand that the original Ageia physx card can become bottlenecked because of the pci interface...but I was actually refering to using a graphics card dedicated to do physx and separate from the graphics setup....it would use pciex16 (or whatever speed X16 slot you had spare on your board) connection and not be bottlenecked.

Never mind, it was more of a rhetorical question anyway I see now that you meant having another gpu handle the physics rather than a dedicated PhysX card.