Santa Clara (CA) – Nvidia announced that it will acquire Ageia, maker of physics accelerator chips and cards.

Rumors that Ageia is up for sale have been floating around the graphics industry ever since Ageia was founded back in 2002. Now it is official and Nvidia will integrate the technology in its product portfolio.

This move follows the path Nvidia has been taking for years, making quick acquisitions as they come along. Recently, it became apparent that the company needed a driver for its GPU physics plans. With Havok now being part of Intel, Ageia was a target that made sense.  

"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."

The acquisition remains subject to customary closing conditions. Financial details of the agreement were withheld.

Cool

Feb 04, 2008 23:11     

hmm I wonder if they will be able to some how incorporate this hardware onto the GPU...
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w00t

Feb 05, 2008 01:32     

It's going to be a few years before nVidia really has some integrated physX on their cards, but thats a step in the right direction thats going to be so cool. No if they could only bring down power consumption I would love to see a video card with a >95w power envelop and the processing power of a 8800Ultra
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w00t

Feb 05, 2008 01:32     

It's going to be a few years before nVidia really has some integrated physX on their cards, but thats a step in the right direction thats going to be so cool. No if they could only bring down power consumption I would love to see a video card with a >95w power envelop and the processing power of a 8800Ultra
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AMD-like

Feb 05, 2008 05:19     

Nvidia buying Ageia, is like AMD buying ATI. Surely, they gonna integrate another hardware in his own, but hurting competition gonna made the hardware slower, in the long term, as when Intel integrated math coprocessors, forcing the world to create graphics accelerators, when Intel failed to deliver performance.
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Ambivalence

Feb 05, 2008 06:09     

It is true that the vast majority of gamers could not care less about physics acceleration, it another way to try and sell more chips and expensive, marketed hardware. It is obvious that most of the computational work could be offloaded to what are mostly inactive cores in desktop cpu, in the era of dual / quad core machines which are nowhere near used to their full potential.
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amd

Feb 05, 2008 07:36     

this is very bad news for amd/ati. There is no way they will be able to compete in the physics on gpgpu market now which should put them a step behind nvidia and now intel in the descrete graphics market.
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Bad news for AMD

Feb 05, 2008 09:31     

Physics acceleration was one thing CrossFireX was supposed to do really well, now we'll probably see physics integrated right into nVidia's cards... Also creates a heck of a schism for the developers that want to use HAVOK versus Ageia's tech, hopefully Intel and nVidia will be able to work out a unified platform...
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why physics accerators?

Feb 05, 2008 23:33     

we dont even use all cores we have on our computers
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