Ageia announced the launch of its PhysX Accelerator cards today, citing immediate availability in systems from Alienware, Dell, and Falcon Northwest. The PCI card, which, as of this writing, we found available from Dell only, is designed to bolster the physics calculations of supporting games. While no current games have the required software built in to take advantage of the new hardware, Ageia's press release said that more than 100 titles are currently in development from game makers such as UbiSoft, Cryptic Studios, NCSoft, Epic Games, and Sega. Ageia also announced that Asus and BFG will be selling the card as a stand-alone product. It didn't specify an MSRP, but adding the card on a Dell XPS 600 is currently a $249 upgrade.

We're excited about the possibilities of physics acceleration. The demo videos on Ageia's Web site are particularly dramatic (check out Hanger of Doom). But it remains to be seen how the cards will impact overall game performance, how broadly developers will code their games to take advantage of the PhysX card, as well as how the PhysX cards will compare against the GPU-accelerated Havok FX support announced earlier in the week.

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