Most of us weren't certain when we'd finally see the fruits of NVIDIA's purchase of physics acceleration company, Ageia, but apparently the technologies will be merging sooner as opposed to later. Because instead of waiting for their newer, unannounced products to hit the market, NVIDIA will be offering GeForce 8 owners a software download to support PhysX. And because NVIDIA doesn't have a history of charging for drivers, we're betting it will be a free upgrade to existing customers.

But how can this possibly work?

It's actually a simple idea. All GeForce 8-series cards include CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). CUDA is essentially an interface for developers to write programs to run off the GPU (as opposed to your computer's CPU). Essentially, NVIDIA is porting PhysX technology to CUDA and powering it with their/your existing 3D hardware.

Also of note: NVIDIA thinks it's a great way to sell their customers higher end cards, and sell more of them per computer.

GeForce 8 graphics processors to gain PhysX support [Techreport via digg]