NVIDIA to acquire AGEIA Technologies! Great for gamers!?

“PhysX on GeForce Will Bring Amazing Physics Dynamics to Millions of Gamers” reads the top of the Press Release on the NVIDIA site! Really? Well, yeah, kinda, In the long run. NVIDIA needs no introduction, they are a super heavy weight of the Graphics Processor Unit industry and have a huge share of the gamer market. NVIDIA’s unvieled it’s intentions to acquire a not-so-flourishing AGEIA Technologies who have had little but some success with their brand name PhysX Processing Unit. PPU was a hit with Sony and they incorporated it in PlayStation 3. Unreal Tournament 3 also incorporated the use of AGEIA’s PPU, but the dismal sales for the title meant little improvement in the user-base number.

NVIDIA brings to AGEIA something the latter did not have. The user-base… as said on Arsetechnica. This is a great news for us gamers. Not only will this improve the physics of games we play in the future, it will also put ATI (NVIDIA’s rival) in a place where they will have to compete their way out, and we might see a further struggle between the two to improve the physics processing of GPUs.

Honestly speaking, the real change anyone’s going to see in this acquisition is well out of 1 or 1.5 years from now. Consoles will not incorporate the ‘newer’ NVIDA chipset, whenever that ships, until they plan to rake out another console. And by they I mean the only three players, Nintendo, MS, and Sony. More over ATI, now a division of AMD, will also be watching this development and would have already plotted and planned to get something to rival or match this alliance. But still, there is time… a good amount of time!

Even though the press release does mention that NVIDIA will adopt all 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony Playstation3, Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii and Gaming PCs, it is sad but true that the cost of the acquisition has not been made public (as noted on Joystiq) and there have been no new titles announced for the newer systems (as noted on PC Gamer). For now, all that remains to see is how gaudy our next games become, and how well the mud-splatter rolls of the screen of a banking 4×4. If you are really into some hardcore geeky stuff about what PhysX is, like me, read the Arstechnica article on it.

No related posts.