Last week, NVIDIA announced that they have agreed to acquire AGEIA. As most here probably know, AGEIA is the company that make the PhysX physics engine and acceleration hardware. The PhysX PPU (physics processing unit) is designed to accelerate the processing of physics calculations in order to offer developers the potential to deliver more realistic and immersive worlds. The PhysX SDK is there for developers to be able to write game engines that can take advantage of either a CPU or dedicated hardware.
While this has been a terrific idea in theory, the benefits of the hardware are currently a tough sell. The problem stems from the fact that game developers can't rely on gamers having a physics card, and thus they are unable to base fundamental aspects of gameplay on the assumption of physics hardware being present. It is similar to the issues we saw when hardware 3D graphics acceleration first came on to the scene, only the impact from hardware 3D was more readily apparent. The long term benefit from physics hardware is less in what you see and more in the basic principles of how a game world works.
Currently, the way the developers make use of PhysX is based on the lowest common denominator performance: how fast can it run on a CPU. With added hardware, effects can scale (more particles, more objects, faster processing, etc.), but you can't get much beyond "eye candy" style enhancements; you can't yet expect game developers to implement worlds dependent on hardware accelerated physics.
The NVIDIA acquisition of AGEIA would serve to change all that by bringing physics hardware to everyone via a software platform already tailored to scale physics capabilities and performance to the underlying hardware. How is NVIDIA going to be successful where AGEIA failed? That's the interesting bit.
Read More:
AnandTech: NVIDIA Acquires AGEIA: Enlightenment and the Death of the PPU
