Nvidia announced it has completed the acquisition of Ageia Technologies, the company behind the PhysX in-game physics acceleration expansion card. The acquisition gives Nvidia access to Ageia's existing base of PhysX card customers, more than 140 released games with PhysX optimization already built in, and over 10,000 registered and active users of the PhysX software development kit.

Soon after completing the deal, Nvidia President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang annonuced that work is currently in progress to port Ageia's physics accelration engine to run in software on Nvidia's existing GeForce 8-series graphics cards, of which the company says more than 50 million have been shipped.

The port would make use of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), Nvidia's programming structure designed to allow general-purpose programs to be accelerated by a GPU's unique parallel processing architecture.

Ageia's own PhysX expansion cards were initially criticized for their relatively high price and the fact that only a few games could take advantage of them. With this move, dedicated PhysX cards will be replaced by multi-GPU setups with one card processing the physics.