NVIDIA Buying AGEIA
By Jonathan on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 11:12 PM PST In Computer, Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Game Related Science, Gamer Life, Games Industry, Hardware, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony
What happens when one of the gaming industry’s biggest leaders in visual computing technology combines forces with one of the biggest leaders in virtual physics technology? Pretty soon, we’ll be able find out. NVIDIA has just announced that they have signed an agreement to purchase AGEIA Technologies, owner of the popular PhysX software used in numerous games.
“The AGEIA team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are—creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences,” stated Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. “By combining the teams that created the world’s most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce®-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world.”
So what does this mean for us, the gamers? Well, a lot of games already incorporate NVIDIA and AGEIA technologies anyway, so I wouldn’t expect to see any immediate effects. Still, having two of the frontrunners of gaming technology working under the same roof can’t be a bad thing.
You can read the full press release here.
I can’t wait to get a gppu lol.
LOL! what will they name themselves as now? AGIDIA?
nah, jokes. this will be great… maybe we’ll see GPU – PPU hybrids XD
What I hope this doesn’t mean: that my 8800 is suddenly even less top-of-the-line.
“Still, having two of the frontrunners of gaming technology working under the same roof can’t be a bad thing.”
But Ageia aren’t a frontrunner in gaming tech, hundreds more games run on the Havok physics tech and don’t need some expensive card to get any sort of benefit.
Non hardware accelerated Ageia physics are almost no different to any other physics tech, you need the PPU to show it off and for me, paying about £100 for a card that will be used by one solitary game that I own (City of Heros/Villains, even then the bosted pysics for that are underwhelming) it’s just now worth it, there are not enough games out that support Ageia to warrant buying one their PPUs yet.
Im sure if Nvidia aquires them, there platform and sdk will become the streamline physics software to use. I mean… they are awesome anyway. Why would you not use the ageia sdk when it is obviously about to become part of gaming history?
I think it was a good idea. I just hope to see Nvidia putting this in their graphics cards some how instead of keeping it two different units.
~Death Dream~
At the moment there is very little reason to buy a PhysX card because I believe only about 13 games use it but if they incorporate the tech into a GPU hopefully devs will take advantage of it. This means I will probably be switching from Ati to Nvidia for my next GPUs.
Interestingly last months edition of Custom PC magazine said in their 2008 predictions that this year would see the end of PhysX unless it is bought out by Nvidia or AMD.