You might not know who Ageia is. They're the jerks who came up with the bright idea to make a dedicated physics chip for videogames to use. This meant you could buy a fancy something-hundred dollar card to install in your computer so that when, say, you shot a crate, it would fall over instead of just blowing up. They called is PhysX. You might have to say that out loud to get it. Go ahead, try it. See? Get it now?

As you can imagine, no one was interested. So Ageia pretty much folded. Earlier this year, they were bought by videocard maker Nvidia, who figured they'd try to get their money's worth by making the fancy physics stuff work on their videocards. All those spare cycles that weren't rendering fancy graphics could devote themselves to crates falling over. If you're running recent Nvidia graphics drivers -- and unless you've got an ATI card, you better be -- then you've got the PhysX drivers on your system. How are those crates working out for you?

This is all pretty boring behind-the-scenes stuff, unless you're trying to play Sacred 2 on a computer similar to mine (it's a standard Dell). Which is what I've been trying to do for about a week. I wasn't having much luck until I cranked the graphics way down, and even then, things were spotty. Well, I'm happy to say that I seem to have figured out that the problem was the PhysX drivers, which is why I called the people at Ageia jerks earlier. Once I disabled the drivers, I was able to bump up the graphics in Sacred 2 to their highest level and have the game actually run without crashing more than one every few hours. I went from my robot dog looking like this...

...to looking like this...