On the GPU side, depending on what you have, your performance is obviously going to vary. Turning on PhysX acceleration is really no different than turning on AA []. Your frames per second may go down, but the visual quality's going to go up.

GO: So I watched the Mirror's Edge demo [see above] and right away I noticed that while the effects are definitely eye-catching, they also seem largely cosmetic.

BDR: There's different levels of PhysX effects. There's the eye candy stuff, then there's the stuff that actually impacts gameplay where you have to move stuff around or try to open a door and things like that.

GO: Right, and I don't want to take away from the cosmetic angle, because it's easy to see where that might increase your emotional investment. I was just...taking this over to the actual EA and 2K Games announcements today, what's the developer cost to take things beyond that cosmetic space and into the gameplay-impacting space?

BDR: Well first, you could conceivably end up in a situation where if you want the full PhysX experience, you have to buy an NVIDIA GPU. Now obviously you can play these games without PhysX turned on, in which case you're just not going to get all the experiential stuff that you get with PhysX. The game's not going to be as exciting, but it'll play perfectly fine on an alternative card.