NVIDIA Plans to Acquire Ageia

[BALISTX]

Nvidia to Acquire AGEIA, Plans PhysX Integration

Hardware manufacturer Nvidia today announced its plans to acquire physics technology developer AGEIA, with the company stating it will integrate AGEIA's PhysX technology into its future line of GeForce graphics cards. - ShackNews.com - Feb 04, 2008 5:06pm CST

This could be very interesting for the future NVIDIA cards.

Nvidia to Acquire AGEIA, Plans PhysX Integration - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads

[Thund3rball]

Cool... I am hoping for bigger, badder gfx cards with outstanding Physics power. Ageia must be drinking a lot of champagne right now. Will we see more Physics technology, as implemented by Nvidia, explored and harnessed by developers in their games? IDK but this is all win for Ageia and probably Nvidia too, and maybe... just maybe... us gamers

[MpG]

The potential is certainly there, especially considering that it's almost impossible to fire up a major game without seeing Nvidia's logo come up. Nvidia seems to be helping developers optimize for their video cards, so if they're willing to offer that level of PhysX support (which I don't beleive Ageia ever got the hang of), things might start to happen.

Wonder how much Ageia was sold for in the end?

[BALISTX]

Apparently NVIDIA will announce the acquisition on Feb 13th.

[belgolas]

Win for everyone !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[trodas]

Win for everyone !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Win for everyone? Hmmm, hmmm, let's hope so. I'm probably too skeptic, but the current trend in GFX chips is already overstressing the size of the chips, so adding another things to the chip is a big no-no, if we ever want to see higher clocks from the cards.
Not to mention power and hence cooling requirments.
So far I seen just few lame physic demos from Ageia and that was nowhere near convincing. Also I saw that with the card the framerate drop noticably, even on dual 8800 cards. Now that is not looking as win-win situation for anyone - well, maybe except nVidia.
The thing might be useless in reality, tough.
The catch is, that you need the CPU to get involved in physic, because physic just reflect game changes on the fly, so doing it in GFX card will slow the GFX card, overstress the PCI buss and slow things down.
Last thing anyone want.
And since it is easy and possible to do outstanding physic just by CPU (HalfLife2, sort of in FarCry but Crysis... whoa), I see no reason at all for doin it over in GFX card, hence saturating the PCIEx bus with updates that need to get from and to CPU ram to be computed in the game engine (no, nowhere near everything will be cumputed in the GFX card, do not have these oversimplificating ideas) ...

What I want to see are games with real-like enviroment that allow changes it it. And that is exactly where the physic stuff is, when done this way, is NOT and will NOT helping anything.

Except slowing things down and making a huge cash-flow for nVidia, because - and now there is the another problem - when you buy a new "Physic capable" GFX card, you will be paying more. Another no-no, right?

So, sorry guys to burst your bubbles, but this is nowhere near win-win situation. More likely the "get busted by paying premium for something that is already a dead-end" technology and that can slow the envolving of games actually down a quite bit.

Remember, back in times where CPU usualy render whole game, including the textures, you can shoot thru things and different weapons have different penetration on different materials. Yes, old good Half Life engine and Counter Strike.
Nowadays you can't shoot thru a tent.
What a "progress" ...

[vdf22]

But the thing is, doing physics on the GPU is so much faster than on the CPU its not even funny. Don't expect even a quad-core CPU to be as fast at physics as a GPU.

I'd just like to see what AMD will do about this. Perhaps physics on Fusion?

[belgolas]

Well some of the old stuff didn't actually use the physx card. There are only a few games that actually use the card but there are over a 100 games that use Ageia's engine like anything from Red Steel (Wii) to Gears of War (360) to Unreal 3. In games like Unreal 3 and Warmonger there are huge performance increases. Basically from unplayable to more than playable. The stuff in Source games is really simplified physics. Even in Half-Life 2 EP2 the physics is all preset and you can't change it.

[CMetaphor]

I was wondering when nvidia was going to do this... ever since they released 8800-series video cards with "more than average ram" I was wondering what it was for... Example: 8800 gts 320mb rather than 256mb, or 640mb rather than 512mb. They tacked on that extra 128mb or so of ram and I thought to myself... "What is graphics-related that could benefit from that little extra 128mb or ram?" Well.... For those of you that don't know, the Aegia PhysX cards all have 128mb of onboard memory to do their physics calcuations etc. I hope thats why there's extra ram on those cards... instead of just some gimmick marketing ploy (that i fell victim to x2 ). Thoughts?

[belgolas]

never thought of that but yeah that is a goo point. Also you have to remember that memory bus is unusual.