NVIDIA bought AGEIA

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi,

quite interesting news! After Intel bough Havok (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070914corp.htm), now NVIDIA buys out AGEIA (http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1202161567170.html), company which produces Physx cards.
This makes me a bit confused :) Do you think we will get someday GeForce containing PhysX chip, or there will be separate line of cards?

Quite interesting times now, ATi has 2in1 accelerator, NVIDIA prepares GeForce 9800 GX2 as truely hot solution ( do not touch with unprotected hand ;) )... if cards will be constructed as multi chip beast with GPU and PPU onboard ... I don't think it is very elegant way for now...

What do you think about it?


Bye,
Petr

[kryton9]

Petr, this is interesting and I think very good news. Can't wait to see what they come up with next year!

[Petr Schreiber]

Update to the story,

it seems there starts intensive PhysicsAPI war for user - Havok, till now commercial, will be available during May 2008 for non commercial project as free.

Source: Havok website (http://www.havok.com/content/view/582/53/)


Bye,
Petr

[kryton9]

Well if Intel ever buys out nvidia, I guess that will end the wars :) Remember that rumor when AMD bought out ATI, then they were saying Intel was then interested in Nvidia. For now it does look messy though, although I see physx branded more in games I recently bought!

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi,

I thought Havok is used much more,
but Havok site says it is used in 200 titles, and PhysX in 140. Not so big difference...

But I do not think Intel will buy NVIDIA, but I might be wrong ... fact is I was surprised a lot when AMD ate ATi :)


Bye,
Petr

[Petr Schreiber]

It seems Mr. Carmack is not excited from buying AGEIA for NVIDIA ;D

Please read following still quite fresh interview: John Carmack on id Tech 6, Ray Tracing, Consoles, Physics and more (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532)

There are also other interesting things mentioned there.


Bye,
Petr

[kryton9]

That is a long interview and you can see that the topic something that is on John Carmack's mind.

About physics, I think he was not happy with the separate physics cards, but that he thinks a unified type api will be good. I was really surprised to hear that major decisions where being made about future hardware directions without any test demos showing the possibilities. That was a big shock to me.

It just makes it all the more amazing that it all comes together year after year with the advances we see. It seems like there is still a lot of cool things coming even with the cool graphics we have already.