When NVIDIA purchased AGEIA Technologies - inventor of PhysX, used to create accurate physics in games via a custom PPU and specifically written software - back in February this year, we all knew what was coming.

Now, just two months on, NVIDIA has announced that the conversion of the PhysX API, through its CUDA programming language that interfaces with the GPUs, is almost complete.

What that means for owners of GeForce 8- and 9-series cards is that you'll soon have PhysX-enabled games, detailed here, running on your card without the explicit need for an additional PPU.

Once finalised, users will be able to download and seamlessly install the CUDA-written driver that enables all that lovely collision action to run seamlessly on existing hardware.

The question, we suppose, is how much of a performance penalty invoking PhysX causes to frame rates?

It's another bow in NVIDIA's armoury against Intel's looming Larrabee, we suppose, but we'll wait and see how Intel uses its Havok physics middleware, purchased last year.