ATI to use integrated graphics circuits for physical effects?

ATI has earlier presented information about how it would be able to handle physical effects with PC games, that with the help of its own graphics circuit would make it obsolete to buy an external physics processor such as AGEIA PhysX. ATI claims that one of the graphics cards could be used to handle a large portion of the physics acceleration above the regular 3D rendering, but that you should for optimal performance use a Crossfire configuration or just an older ATI graphics card to handle the physics acceleration. Now it has supplied another angle, it namely says that it s looking into the possibility of using an integrated graphics circuit for physics acceleration when using an external graphics card.

Integrated graphics circuits are hardly the best performing circuits available and AGEIA claims that it is naive to think that you would be able to make a well performing physics accelerator out of such a circuit. That AGEIA would counter is of course no major surprise and even if ATI doesn’t have any concrete plans for moving further with this idea it is an interesting idea of how you could gain some extra performance, as it is available.