For starters, Intel is prepared for battle. The company paid a hefty price for Havok, but it had a one-year head start and its ace remains the Westmere/Sandy Bridge CPU in combination with the Larrabee cGPU. AMD will integrate the GPU with a CPU in a project named Fusion, but the company has a Lego block approach, so additional computing units are not excluded.

Right now, it looks to us that Nvidia may have made just another smart acquisition and Ageia could turn out to be another 3dfx or ULi Technologies, companies Nvidia ate ages ago.

Gamers will now get hardware physics, Nvidia gets another set of technologies to toy with, and the competition is more than alive. Cards are dealt and the game is about to begin.