RSSNVidia closes the deal with Ageia
By Michael Hatamoto | Published February 13, 2008, 2:10 PM
GPU manufacturer NVidia has successfully acquired physics processor maker Ageia Technologies, in a deal announced last week. The new parent told BetaNews today it could add PhysX technology into future GeForce GPU products as soon as possible.
"We're really excited about the future of physics and Ageia," NVidia Public Relations spokesperson Derek Perez told BetaNews. "We hope adding more physics technology into GeForce will impact the way virtual worlds look and behave, thus helping to drive the end user experience."
"It doesn't change anything with the OEMs at all," Perez added when asked what impact the buyout will have with Ageia's OEM contacts. BFG Technologies is one OEM that produces both NVidia-based graphics cards and Ageia-based physics cards, though it once again declined to comment on the deal.
Nvidia's purchase will position it in direct competition with Havok, the physics processor maker Intel purchased in September. AMD briefly considered purchasing Ageia last November, though observers believe that after suffering the backlash from its purchase of ATI, AMD was knocked out of the running.
NVidia and Ageia will appear jointly in San Francisco next week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), where the first details on new, potentially jointly-branded products are expected to be revealed.
Finally a buyout that makes since. Glad to see that NVIDIA isnt run by a bunch of monkeys like some other large corps.
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|I was thinking roughly the same thing.
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|Same.
Still think that AMD shouldn't have aacquired ATI and then they could have had the money and resources now to acquire aegis, but there was no way they could have outdone nvidia. I am almsot glad only because nvidia-aegis seems like a better match than AMD-Aegis would have been, but at the same time this makes NVIDIA the leader by an even wider margin.
Why is it...NVIDIA is not yet portrayed as "evil" in the media just like other big Corps are, I wonder?
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|I can remember them catching some tech media flak when they bought out 3DFX a few years ago. But that was mostly a fear of monopoly thing. I don't think anyone at that time expected ATI to bust out the way they did.
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|Ageia is so much better than Havok. I think this is a good buy for Nvidia, the two companies will compliment each other well.
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|Well if it gets some nice physics eye-candy stuff out in the mainstream then this could be very nice.
....but damn that's another wait for me.
I'd almost decided to jump on the 8800GT 512mb card but now I'll wait and see what the next round brings.
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|I'm less interested in the eye-candy and more interested in the playability effects.
Hollowing out a cavern with RPGs, blocking the exit/entrance once you're out and then lying in wait as your opponent runs over the weakened surface...Blocking both sides of a tunnel, making your own tunnel, downing a tree to cross a ravine...and then blasting the tree.
The possibilities are endless if they program it correctly with proper physics, a lot of which they can't do or can only do in certain areas due to CPU constraints.
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