Physics Processing Unit

From TPU Reference

Overview

A Physics Processing Unit, or PPU for short, is a microprocessor dedicated to virtual physics calculations. The only stand alone implementation available to consumers today is AGEIA's PhysX line of PCI expansion cards.

In the future, with the advent of new adaptable GPU architectures such as General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU), major GPU manufactures like ATI and NVIDIA plan to use GPU resources to aid in physics calculations which would otherwise burden the computer's CPU. One approach is to add an additional midrange video card to the system which is dedicated to Physics processing, the other approach is to share the GPU between rendering and physics processing. The latter is still far from working and has huge performance penalties in its current state.

As of now, there are few games that support this technology. However, games that do support physics processing often have more "eye-candy", and the ability for deeper, more life like game environment interaction.