Like Nvidia, ATI is looking to games middleware developer Havok to connect game code to its GPUs. The Havok FX API runs physics-based special-effects algorithms through pixel shader pipelines rather than the host CPU. ATI's pitch is that its graphics cards provide a better foundation for this technique than its rival's products do. Indeed, the company presented a chart to journalists showing its GPUs massively out-performing Nvidia's when running object-collision detection routines - though it later admitted the chart was actually a forecast of the performance boost it expects its chips to provide rather than measurements it has actually taken. ATI is pushing its Radeon X1600 as its physics-dedicated GPU of choice, a part it claims delivers twice the performance of Ageia's dedicated PPU chip - well, based on "estimates" derived from sphere-to-sphere collisions per second numbers made public by Ageia. The X1600's half the price of Ageia-based physics boards, ATI claimed.

In related news, TweakTown recorded some short 640 x 480 video footage of the ATI hardware physics in action with commentary from Chris at ATI. The video is about 52MB and can be downloaded here (50MB)

Games with physics processor support are expected to ship late this year or early 2007. By then, ATI expects to have drivers available that will allow a graphics card to run as a physics card, whether that's one GPU alongside a pair of CrossFire cards that handle the imaging, or two GPUs, one for graphics, the other for physics