Nvidia to buy Ageia… Yes, somebody actually wants a Phys-X
February 4 Carl Nelson
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Nvidia announced today that they plan to buy Ageia, makers of the other most unwanted piece of specialty gaming hardware (the other being BFG’s super ethernet card).
Although nobody actually wanted or bought a Phys-X card, and there are very few games that make use of the engine (although Nvidia stated in their press release that there are 140 games, I can only think of a few decent ones - Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2, UT3, and Gears of War), Nvidia’s plans actually sort of make sense. Instead of trying to sell us another PCI card that we don’t really need, they plan on integrating Phys-X onto their graphics cards. This way, you could buy the GeForce card you were always going to buy, and have the extra physics processor as well. This will only matter if game makers start deciding to make use of the API - a tricky proposition considering that multi-core CPUs do quite a good job of it already, and Microsoft already plans to add physics processing to DirectX.
Filed under: PC Hardware
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