The big talk of today is that with the support of physics guru mob "Havok" (the master minds behind the majority of awesome physics found in gaming titles to date. As an example, Half Life 2), NVIDIA have announced plans to introduce a physics effects solution via their SLI platform; thats right folks, dedicated physics processing for games by means of your GPU(s).

Mid last year AGEIA were the first to announce plans to release a dedicated physics processing card (dubbed the PhysX), but without any competition or momentum in order to make it a big happening thing, the process to get it off the ground has been painfully slow.

Now that NVIDIA have stepped up to the plate it will be interesting to see what comes of this next big move to push the envelope further in terms of how immersive and realistic our gaming experience is yet to become.

NVIDIA's official press release can be found here. There's also some coverage on the subject at PC Perspective, RojakPot & HardOCP.

Furthermore, the lads at FiringSquad have conducted an interview with Havok's vice president of product management, Jeff Yates regarding their move to support NVIDIA with "Havok FX".

SANTA CLARA, CA-March 20, 2006-NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, and Havok, the game industry's leading supplier of cross-platform middleware, will be demonstrating a physics effects solution that runs completely on a graphics processing unit (GPU) -an industry first-at this year's Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California (March 21st through 24th).

The result of an ongoing engineering collaboration between Havok and NVIDIA, this new software product from Havok-called Havok FX™-enables the simulation of dramatically-detailed physical phenomena in PC games, when powered by GPUs such as NVIDIA GeForce®7 or 6 Series GPUs and further amplified with NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technology. The Havok FX product is currently in early release to select developers and is expected to be available this summer.