Announced yesterday, ATI’s Triple Play solution involves using a third video card for physics.

Until now, only AGEIA and NVIDIA announced a physic solution. AGEIA has its own solution and videocards while NVIDIA uses Havok FX.

While two Radeon videocards are used for Crossfire, the third one uses raw gigaflops of its Radeon 1000-series to process physics. But this way the user must buy a third card and is not even sure how good will it work. More, the cost will go up as hell.

More, several games already use AGEIA and many more are under production. This will be a good start for AGEIA while NVIDIA and ATI will have to compete to gain some part of the market.

Here is what Michael Steel responded for FiringSquad:

“The performance claims appear to be based solely on gigaflops of the Radeon chips and an assumption of PhysX gigaflops, but that is not a meaningful way to measure physics performance. That’s like suggesting that the more wheels I have on my car, the faster I will go. Physics requires much more than raw gigaflops.”

“Graphics processors are designed for graphics. Physics is an entirely different environment. Why would you sacrifice graphics performance for questionable physics? You’ll be hard pressed to find game developers who don’t want to use all the graphics power they can get, thus leaving very little for anything else in that chip.”

““Boundless Gaming” is actually enabled by AGEIA’s Gaming Power Triangle in which the PhysX processor adds true physics to the mix instead of leaving it to a repurposed graphics processor.”

Now we must wait for a response from ATI.