Nvidia Acquires Ageia

[Andy Chalk]

Nvidia Acquires Ageia

PhysX [http://www.nvidia.com]SDK.

Details of the acquisition will be released during Nvidia's quarterly conference call on February 13, but in a press release, company president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said, "The Ageia team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are - creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences. By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce [http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_family.html]-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world."

California-based Ageia was launched in 2002, and is responsible for both the PhsyX software for Windows and Linux as well as the dedicated physics processing unit of the same name. Games that support PhysX hardware acceleration include PlayStation 3 [http://www.ea.com/moh/airborne/].

"Nvidia is a perfect fit for us," said Ageia CEO Manju Hegde. "They have the world's best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience."


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[brimstone1392]

Personally, I think this is good news for us PC dorks. I remember when nvidia came out with the first commercial (and relatively cheap) 3d accelerators. It revolutionized pc gaming and allowed for the creation of some of the best games we've ever seen. Of course, it also caused developers to push the limits of what their games could do with this new technology, causing a domino effect of bad games that were only considered good because they were pretty, completely destroying the notion of gaming depth that PC gamers and developers large and small had prided themselves on for years prior, and eventually leading to that overblown, over-hyped pile of "pretty, pretty, sparkly things" known as Crysis.

Now kiddies, see if you can spot the point in that run on sentence.

Seriously now, I can't remember what I was getting at with all this.

Little help? Please?

 

[Arcticflame]

This could be the start of something huge.

Or, it could fizzle and die.

Great, now as long as it isn't moderately sucessful, I'm covered.

 

[Arbre]

Most interesting.
There are several possible outcomes to this alliance, and I wonder what it will look like on the hardware.
Many didn't believe in the existence of purely physics dedicated chipsets, as the GPUs were already doing a good job there.
I wonder if the next card will have chipsets hybrids, or just the same GPUs, but benefiting from new code lines and the experience of Ageia.

Anyway, this could be a very tough punch in the guts for ATI. Maybe these guys could then, as an answer, make their cards more geared towards other video related industries, to favour, for example, 2D applications, say eventually team up with some VFX company to develop a new technology that would bond audio and visuals in a new way we have not thought about (just throwing lame ideas here, but frankly, I hate it when there's no competition).

 

[Lightbulb]

I think the best thing for ATi to do is NOT get a physics based product.

Will devs use physics cards if half the field doesn't have physics cards?

 

[Chaos Marine]

They will if nVidia start tossing in Physix chips into their GPU range. Heck, I might hold off buying one of the 9xxx GTX series if the following model will come with Physix as part of the package.

 

[Haliwali]

I think the best thing for ATi to do is NOT get a physics based product.

Will devs use physics cards if half the field doesn't have physics cards?

You sir, need to pay attention. A developer will always try to make his game as impossible to play as possible. This alienation makes people feel inferior, and go out to buy new cards and chips. And I keep crawling back for more...