Right now, Badit is chasing the goal of porting PhysX to the Radeon HD 4800, but ATI's not giving them any hardware yet, much less developer and PR support. Not totally surprising that ATI would stall, since porting their rival's physics engine to their cards is a definite poke at them and the Havok engine they license from Intel.

And making PhysX more universal by having it run on ATI cards makes it more likely to be supported by game developers, which isn't so hot for Havok. Nvidia's definitely got the upper deck here, since in the meantime ATI looks like a bunch of meanies, but helping out Badit threatens their own wares. [TGDaily]

A Radeon HD 3870 system jumped from an overall 3D Mark Vantage score of P3800 to P4262. Though it won't be available for ATI's latest 4800 cards for a bit, you can download the PhysX enabler this weekend at NGOHQ, which should make your Unreal experience on ATI that much sweeter. [NGOHQ via TG Daily via /.]

PhysX technology has yet to take off, but with GPU integration, it is poised to breakout in a serious way. In fact, there are around 140 games that are supported or currently in development that utilize the technology. It may also go a long way to silence critics that say GPUs may not be necessary in the future given the increasing power of multi-core CPUs. [TG Daily via Slashgear]

For build-to-order you start at $1249 and a pre-fab $1299 edition comes with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB graphics cards with SLI technology. But the expansion possibilities in the standard ATX chassis include overclockable Corsair Dominator memory and Intel Extreme processors, up to three factory installed HDDs (with a fourth bay for your own tinkering) and an optional AGEIA PhysX accelerator.

In other words, reading the fine print, it sounds like no one is going to be satisfied with the base config—even though it will come with pretty LED lighting zones that synchronize with game play. [Dell]

For one, AGEIA's standalone PhysX cards haven't really broken into the mainstream computing. Throwing their chips onto NVIDIA's graphics cards would push adoption, and by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's reasoning,

"encourage people to buy even better GPUs. It might—and probably will—encourage people to buy a second GPU for their SLI slot. And for the highest-end gamer, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs. Potentially two for graphics and one for physics, or one for graphics and two for physics."

The only laptop currently capable of running the Ageia PhysX engine, and Unreal Tournament 3's dreaded Tornado Mod (shown in the gallery), it's built for an immersive experience. There's sort of an Ambilight effect going on, something that is apparently best enjoyed when playing games in near darkness: all of the LEDs can be programmed to work with the game engine, so that when you take a hit, or pick up a weapon, the lights in speakers, keyboard and outer shell all react, like this:
It's a heavy machine, starting at around 11lbs, but easily up and over 12lbs once you load 'er up. Dual HDD slots can be used in a RAID array, and Blu-ray will be an option, good for the 1920 x 1280 screen that has a sweet 7ms response time. Here it is, from all angles:

[Official Site]