During NVIDIA's financial conference call on Wednesday (you can listen it here), company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced during the Q&A session that they plan to use the PhysX game physics software from their just acquired company AGEIA and port it so it can run on GeForce 8 series GPUs. There was no word on when this will be released.

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...Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA. Huang thinks the integration will encourage people to spend more on graphics processing hardware, as well:

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.