After Nvidia's acquisition of Ageia, PhysX development turned away from PPU extension cards and focused instead on the GPGPU capabilities of modern GPUs. A graphics processing unit or GPU (also occasionally called visual processing unit or VPU) is a dedicated graphics rendering device for a personal computer, workstation or game console. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for a range of complex algorithms, such as accelerating physical simulations using PhysX. A GPU can sit on top of a video card, or it can be integrated directly into the motherboard. More than 90% of new desktop and notebook computers have integrated GPUs.
Any CUDA-ready GeForce graphics card (series 8 and newer, with a minimum of 32 cores and 256MB of video memory) can take advantage of PhysX without the need to install a dedicated PhysX card.
Versions 186 and newer of the ForceWare drivers disable PhysX hardware acceleration if a GPU from a different manufacturer, such as AMD, is present in the system. Representatives at Nvidia stated to customers that the decision was made due to development expenses, and for quality assurance and business reasons. This decision has caused a backlash from the community that led to the creation of a community patch for Windows 7, circumventing the GPU check in Nvidia's updated drivers. To counter this patch, Nvidia implemented a time bomb in driver versions 196 and 197 that slowed down hardware accelerated PhysX and reversed the gravity, but an updated version of the patch removed all unwanted effects.