Asus will begin shipping a dedicated physics processing board based on Ageia's PhysX PPU in May, the company said today. The card contains 256MB of memory dedicated to environment calculations designed to make virtual worlds feel more real to game players. Ageia announced PhysX last week. It claims that 60 developers - including UbiSoft, Cryptic Studios, NCSoft, Epic Games and Sega - are working on 100 games with support for the company's physics calculation API.

Ageia's pitch is that PhysX can not only take the burden of calculating physical effects off the main processor, but can dedicate more compute power to the task than the CPU can. The upshot will be worlds that work in more realistic ways: explosions can generate dust and debris; cloth can hang, tear and move when touched the way it does in the real world; smoke and fog can be wafted away as objects move through it; trees and litter can be blown by the wind; objects can be damaged in a variety of random ways, to different extents.

The question is, will games developers support and gamers buy Ageia's single-purpose boards, or will they prefer to devote resources and cash to graphics cards they're going to have to buy anyway.