GS: Epic announced a couple of months ago that it is using NovodeX physics in Unreal Engine 3. Ageia, the company behind the NovodeX API, is preparing to release a physics chip for the PC. How will UE3-based PC games take advantage of the Ageia hardware?

MR: Things that you write for the NovodeX API automatically become hardware-accelerated, automatically get faster [with a physics processor]. What's more significant isn't really that. What you get is instead of having 600 rocks rolling down a hill you have to do 6,000 rocks rolling down a hill. So you'll be able to do so much more, do much deeper simulations than what we could possibly do without it. But people who don't have it won't feel completely ripped off--they just won't get the full experience.

GS: The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 will both have extremely powerful multicore processors capable of doing a lot of physics calculations. Is that going to make it difficult for developers to port console games over to the PC?

MR: The PlayStation 3 Cell architecture is very similar to the hardware design of the Ageia chip, so the PC will be able to get superaccelerated also. The Ageia NovodeX API, when they bring it over to the PlayStation 3, will be very fast, very powerful--similar to the Ageia [chip]. But the cool thing about that is if someone's lead moneymaking platform is the PlayStation 3, they're going physics up the wazoo because they have so much power. That makes it a very economical choice for PC users than to just pop a [physics] chip into the PC and then have the full physics effects that will be available on the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360.