Everyone agreed that 3D acceleration cards were "the future" when they first came on the scene in the late 90's, but it took some time for that future to emerge. I remember testing an early ATI card that actually ran more slowly in accelerated mode than using pure software rendering. By the time the first 3DFX card emerged, however, the benefits were obvious. Games like Tomb Raider and Quake 2 looked so much better with 3D acceleration that nobody wanted to buy a non-3D card again.
The latest idea to hit PC gaming is the physics accelerator, a device that will speed up calculations that have nothing to do with drawing more triangles, but will instead assist in figuring out the math behind objects that explode, shatter, bounce, crash, and otherwise behave in interesting ways.
The technology is bleeding-edge, and the first standalone physics accelerator, the Ageia PhysX, has just come out on the market. The big question right now is whether or not games will support the card, and Tim Sweeney was asked about just that recently at E3. He mentioned that the Unreal Tournament 2007 team is indeed evaluating how they can add PhysX support to their game:
"Anywhere from explosions to have physically interacting particles... we are also looking at fluid effects to see where we can use those, gee, blood spurts sound like they might be a good candidate! A lot of other special effects like that, where they don't affect the core game play, so that players with the physics hardware and players without the physics hardware can all play together without any restrictions."
Adding support for the card is not an easy process for developers. The makers of Ghost Recon have been criticized for including support for PhysX that winds up decreasing frame rates, because of the greater number of objects that have to be rendered by the graphics card itself. This evokes memories of that early ATI card I mentioned, and suggests that perhaps the technology is not quite ready for prime time.
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