After recently acquiring mental images to bolster its arsenal with the addition of mental ray rendering software, NVIDIA has signed a definitive agreement to acquire gaming physics technology leader AGEIA Technologies Inc. Now PhysX on GeForce will bring enhanced physics dynamics to gamers, as AGEIA's software is widely adopted on the next-gen consoles.
"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."
"NVIDIA is the perfect fit for us. They have the world's best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience," added Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of AGEIA.
Like graphics, physics processing is made up of millions of parallel computations. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT GPU, with its 112 processors, can process parallel applications up to two orders of magnitude faster than a dual or quad-core CPU.
"The computer industry is moving towards a heterogeneous computing model, combining a flexible CPU and a massively parallel processor like the GPU to perform computationally intensive applications like realtime computer graphics," continued Huang. "NVIDIA's CUDA technology, which is rapidly becoming the most pervasive parallel programming environment in history, broadens the parallel processing world to hundreds of applications desperate for a giant step in computational performance. Applications such as physics, computer vision and video/image processing are enabled through CUDA and heterogeneous computing."
AGEIA Technologies Inc. (www.ageia.com) is an industry leader in gaming physics technology. AGEIA's PhysX software is widely adopted with more than 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and Gaming PCs. AGEIA physics software is pervasive with more than 10,000 registered and active users of the PhysX SDK. AGEIA is also credited with developing the world's first dedicated hardware physics processor, the AGEIA PhysX processor. The company, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is privately-held.
NVIDIA (www.nvidia.com) serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro products and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara and has offices throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
