nVidia Acquires Ageia (PhysX)
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I was apparently hiding under a rock when this happened (as many of us were, I’m sure), but nVidia acquired Ageia. This is excellent! If you don’t know why, read on…
Ageia, if you don’t recall, is that strange little company that designed a really smooth physics engine that many games picked up (approximately 140 give or take a few). This physics engine supports a special card called a PPU or physics processing unit. Only Ageia makes these, so if people want higher FPS on games running PhysX, they could spend $200 for one of these and lighten the load on their CPU. Among a large number of titles that use this engine today is Unreal Tournament 3!
nVidia had been allowing their GPUs (through the CUDA platform) to run physics processing as well. However, this was picking up less than stunningly. They therefore opted to buy the competition, making PhysX support CUDA. This means, for all us 8800-series-and-up owners of nVidia cards, that all PhysX games will now support our GPU for physics processing, and those 140 (and growing in number) games will play better than ever. This hasn’t quite happened yet, but nVidia has this to say:
NVIDIA will deploy PhysX on CUDA-enabled GPUs later this year. The exact models and availability will be announced in the near future.
ATI is going to be flailing for a bit now, as PhysX picks up and nVidia obviously won’t support their opponent’s Radeon GPUs. I for one, being the owner of a Geforce 8800 GTX 768MB OC’d edition, can’t wait.
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