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Most complex events in today's computer games-a stack of boxes tipping over, an avalanche-are just prerecorded animations that give you the same outcome every time. But design a game with physics processing, and suddenly it's like the real world: The boxes fall differently depending on how they're hit, and the avalanche may or may not knock you off the mountain. Games have had physics processing for a while, but Ageia's new PhysX processor, available on cards from BFG Technologies and ASUS, is the first to take the physics-equation-crunching load off the CPU, allowing game makers to program far more complex and realistic scenarios. Expect it to do for game behavior what video cards did for graphics. $250â€$300