I wonder if any MMO has tried using specialized hardware accelerators like ASIC or FPGA boards for acceleration of e.g. voxel based physics?<p>If anything, it's easier to justify running exotic hardware on a server, where its cost will amortize among thousands of players, than it is to expect users to install it on the client. And the game industry <i>has</i> tried physics accelerators for clients (PhysX).