It seems like there has been a struggle between quality physics and quality graphics in games as of late. Either a game has an incredibly nice physics engine with decent graphics or the opposite. I think this is trending towards gaming PCs and even consoles requiring a physics card in the future. Right now physics are handled by the CPU but with a dedicated physics card the CPU could be freed up to perform more base level engine code with the physics card picking up all of the slack.
There have been some attempts at this in the past but nothing has really stuck. I think this is primarily because no game developer wants to adopt a standard method of physics modeling which a physics card will require. Basically, no one has made OpenGL/DirectX for physics yet. A physics library like that would be incredibly useful though.
