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nVidia buy Ageia

Heh not exactly difficult to be the industry leader in gaming physics technology...

Either way I see this as a good thing personally... either nVidia will quietly bury it like they've done with past aquisitions... or incorporate the instruction set into their GPUs and we'll actually see developers bothering to put hardware accelerated physics into games... which means the envelope for what is possible will hugely open up...
 
Its not about the hardware they had, its about their engineers and software expertise on the Physics front. Their SDK is one of the popular ones i believe? Even though many games using the SDK didnt use their cards.
 
This can only mean good things, i seriously dont get some of you doomsayers
I hope they integrate it onto the boards, my only worry would be that it iscolates ati reducing competition
I think it will take a game developer push to get things standardised, until then i expect it will be a addon cards
 
This can only be a good thing... Nvidia gfx cards will still be the same, but hopefully they will incorporate a physics chip aswell, it has shown potential, but ppl have been put off by the cost... This way you can have your cake and eat it... (time to play some portal)... Hehe... :D
 
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I just thought, i hope this doesn't mean Nvidia cards are going to cost more as they incorporate a Physics chip onboard... :mad:
 
What needs to happen for this to take off is:
AMD create a chip of their own, easily integrated to their next generation of cards
A standardized API is created so that games can code for this universally, doesn't help anyone if they need to code 4 seperate codepaths for this, one for Nvidia, one for Intel(when they enter the graphics field), one for AMD and one for CPUs.

Something like a DirectX API for physics or something similar would work, possibly as a part of DX11, which hopefully will be out for Vista. That would also give the companies the chance to go market the new cards as "next-gen" wonder cards, that worked so brilliantly with the 8800GTX.

The future processors can be dedicated to graphics card calls, memory management, and everything else they need to do, that can only be considered a good thing. No one has the knowledge of parallel computing that the graphics card companies do, so they'd do a fine job integrating this.
 
BlackAle said:
The hardware is irrelevant, Nvidia have basically bought Ageia's intellectual property, obviously Nvidia think they can gain from it.
Click to expand...

And obiviously a physics system that's used in quite a few games nowadays, regardless of whether the game uses PPU acceleration or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#Title_support for those who do use the PPU, that's quite a few nice titles that has sold a bit.
 
No major surprise that Ageia was bought out. PhysX cards hardly set the gaming world on fire though did provide interesting technology that would have one of the big two interested so was bound to be put onto cards like DVD hardware accelerator cards were.
 
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