Kotaku
NVIDIA today confirmed rumblings that they were looking to buy physics-centric AGEIA Technologies. NVIDIA said today that an agreement to acquire the industry leaders in gaming physics, though the acquisition still remains subject to some closing conditions.
More details about the deal will shake out during NVIDIA's upcoming quarterly conference call, set for Feb. 13.
While AGEIA appears to continue to struggle breaking into the mainstream PC market, they've made significant in-roads into the console market with 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and PC. The company has more than 10,000 registered and active users of their PhysX software development kit as well.
"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," said Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of AGEIA.
Full release on the jump. I wonder if NVIDIA would try to come up with a way to incorporate the PhysX engine into a graphics card, instead of requiring two pieces of hardware? Maybe that's not possible, actually.
SANTA CLARA, CA — FEBRUARY 4, 2008—NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA), the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AGEIA Technologies, Inc., the 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 Playstation3, Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii and Gaming PCs. AGEIA physics software is pervasive with over 10,000 registered and active users of the PhysX SDK.
"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," said 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 128 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 real-time computer graphics," continued Mr. 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 was founded in 2002 and has offices in Santa Clara, CA; St. Louis, MO; Zurich, Switzerland; and Beijing, China.
The acquisition remains subject to customary closing conditions.
More details about the acquisition will be provided during NVIDIA's quarterly conference call, to be held on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Pacific Time. The Company's prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer period, which will be limited to questions from financial analysts and institutional investors. To listen to the conference call, please dial 212-231-2901; no password is required. The conference call will also be webcast live (listen-only mode) at the following Web sites: www.nvidia.com and www.streetevents.com.
Replay of the conference call will be available via telephone by calling 800-633-8284 (or 402-977-9140), passcode 21354792, until February 20, 2008. The webcast will be recorded and available for replay until the company's conference call to discuss its financial results for its first quarter, fiscal 2009.
About AGEIA
Comments
OMG, can you imagine the video/physics cards to come in the future after this merger? I, nor my wallet, certainly cannot!
It's... Beautiful......
Sounds like this would lead to nothing but good things.
this would give them another advantage when it comes to driver-support. you can bet the nvidia cards would be optimised like hell for games using the proprietary physx middleware
Intel bought Havok. NVIDIA bought AGEIA. Can someone enlighten us as to why computer hardware manufactures are buying physics engines?
I thought Nvidia was big on the doing physics based calculations using a GPU, though I guess Ageia could end up working on that.
I agree with Justhesh, I can only see good things coming from this.
DAMN! No they di-ent!
When can I expect my GeForce 100000005600 with built-in gravity emulator and worm-hole vortex?
Really? What has Ageia done thats profitable though? They have Physics card which isn't gaining mainstream attention and they made a game to work with the physics card.
How is Nvidia benefiting from this?
@MasterOfPastures:
Q1 '09
Lets hope this means no more stand alone physics cards for us to buy.
At least nobody was hurt
This is an great venture for NVIDIA. This will certainly raise the PC gaming level up to new heights.
@NinjaBurg3r: One can only imagine my friend. Only time will tell...
@Lixie: Well, actually AGEIA did make a physics hardware card at one point but it didn't seem to go over to well.
Can't wait to see what wonderful beautys this new relationship will spawn.
It will be nice to see a graphics card with an on-board physics process built-in as long as the physics processor does not add overly to the price (and that more games support physics processors, but Nvidia should be able to take care of that).
Combining 2 cards = the price of 2 cards for one?
so what's ati/amd's answer?
Terrible idea for NVIDIA. I have a physx card, and it is utterly useless-- even in games that support it. In physx-based games, the physx effects are bottlenecked by the PPU-- the damn card is too weak to power things built FOR it.
Their physics engine is great, though. Definitely on par with havok, and apparently it is MUCH cheaper to license. Perhaps NVIDIA hopes to get all the good things about the physx card onto their next videocards, and begin to optimize the engine for their cards. That'd be a sickening blow to AMD/ATI if it became widely supported.
@Nirolak:
I think they still do, don't they? I mean they just released Warmonger specifically to show off what the card can do and to increase sales - because to be honest even on low on a killer system the fps is beneath 20.
After all the bullshit from ATI and nVidia about using a spare graphics card to do physics on GPU it looks like nVidia are taking the easy way out. Given nVidia's massive resources at the moment and AMD's relative fall in value it wouldn't surprise me to see them buy AMD either. nVidia need a CPU line they can call their own, with Intel developing their own GPUs it won't be long before Intel doesn't need AMD(ATI) or nVidia.
so what's a physics engine for? I just don't get it
@TheHun: *i meant card
OH NO. AMD better find someone to buy to compete now. *waves ATI foam finger*
@demonwolf:
Integrated GPU's on motherboards I guess.
Re: Would it be possible to put a graphics chip and a physics chip on the same board?
Probably yes. They could do a setup like the 7900 (or upcoming 9800 GX2) or whatever the ATI version is with a PCI bridge chip. Instead of adding a second GPU behind the bridge, they could add a physics chip.
Now would they want to do this? I'd go with very, very doubtful.
Thank the diety of your choice. Honestly, I was never able to validate buying a second card because... well, I already bought the one. I see gravity in action constantly. I'm not going to shell out extra cash to see super-extra-gravity in a game.
@Lixie:
Intel bought Havok... Nvidia bought Ageia... but wait? Didn't intel buy nvidia? o_O
Of course it's entirely possible that Nvidia made this move, not to make use of the technology, but to put an end to it.
"Buy him out, boys!"
Why the hell not? Packard Bell used to put sound/graphics/modem on one card back in the day. And those were the cheapest ass, ghetto computers you could buy!
@photoboy: I would imagine Anti-trust laws would take effect to stop the monopoly.
Hahaha oh man, as if ATI wasn't getting slaughtered in the GPU market enough already. Now this!
@Witzbold: yeah we all wish just wait soon we will all be paying double, but hey I could be wrong well I hope I am.
I recall Nvidia talking up using their GPU's as physics modelers for gaming soon after Ageia shipped their first card. This was not surprising considering they already have a line of high-performance parallel computing cards/PC's called Tesla and a SDK, CUDA, which is used for financial modeling and oil exploration. I think this aquisition might have more to do with eliminating the chance that Ageia might move into that market.
Go Nvidia!! This is good news! Now when will we see CellFactor for Ps3/360?
@DARK DVNT [XBL];8908-2379-8728-6953 [Wii]:
Not as long as the others are still viable alternatives.
I'm glad. Hopefully this means half the new gaming PCs will come with PhysX along with their GFX card. That means better physics (of course) and better AI since it's freeing up processor cycles.
@sugardeath: Nope, AMD bought ATI.
Although people were thinking that after AMD acquired ATI, nothing has happened.
A combined GPU and physics accelerator doesn't sound too far-fetched. It's also good to remember that already lots of stuff traditionally calculated by the CPU is moving to the GPU. NVIDIA is effectively stopping a competitor while acquiring their technology. I actually doubt they'll bother with a separate card, and instead just add physx-compatibility to the GeForce series or something similar.
@Lixie: Simple, physics is the new reason to get more processing power into your box. i.e. it sells silicon.
Two thumbs up! I want to see more games take advantage of (good) physics technology, and this is a good way to encourage it.
@DARK DVNT [XBL];8908-2379-8728-6953 [Wii]: Yeah that would be a significant problem, but if AMD can buy ATI I'm sure nVidia could be allowed to buy AMD. Maybe! ;)
Seriously though it would be nice if they can combine 2 cards into 1. Since the less things I have shoved into my "oven" the better.
But BFG (maybe some others too) is still making and selling licensed PhysX cards. I don't want to be the guy to sort that mess out.
i can honestly see nothing but good from this. Ageia physics engine may not be mind blowing but it is pretty efficient.
@Heartwork:
they made quite a hit with the HD38xx actually
Industry leaders?
Thats Havok isnt it?
good old irish corpse tumbling fun.
@infi: Only as long as you don't look at the 8800GT for £20 more, let alone the GTS 512MB. They slaughter anything ATi has to offer except the HD3870 X2.
[images.tomshardware.com]
[images.tomshardware.com]
BTW, my new card is at the top of those two charts (:
Ageia's physics cards were a good idea, but a really tough sell. Just like back in the day when being able to offload 3D handling to it's own card, offloading the physics in a game to a separate processor gives you a lot more spare CPU cycles for other fun things like A.I. If it is combines with a graphics card even if more expensive it will be able to break into the market.
Physics in games right now is really just a sad joke. Almost everything you see in most games nowadays isn't physics, but programming tricks to create foux physics. That's why a couch can stop bullets or when a person dies in a corner he looks like a victim from the manhattan experiments with his head and legs half in the wall. Real (or semi) physics in games can add a whole layer of realism (if thats what you're looking for) to games that just isn't there today.
Physics are a hard sell for games currently, but once they become more prevailant and pervasive expect to start seeing some really amazing things.... Oh, and I'm excited about the potential for this unholy union of graphics and physics. wooo! wooo! Pew! Pew!
Graphics AND Physics...rolled together into one hot, sweaty ball of silicon? Oh, those Luna demos are going to be AWESOME!
This, actually didn't surprise me, for a very simple reason. Nvidia had no choice.
The the PC video card market is in trouble. Sure it may seem fine now, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that the cards are becoming more powerful faster than the programmers can ramp up their code. It's not at a critical point right now, but four to five years from now GPU's will be so powerful that neither the monitor nor the human eye would be able to, "perceive," all the extra pixels they're outputting. *You can only ramp up frames per second and resolution so high before neither the eye or monitor can keep up.*
To avoid this fate, Nvidia has to expand the capabilities of the video card to cover things other than just graphics. You can to see the outlining of this when Nvidia started leaking plans to integrate sound cards into the GPU, and when they tried, *unsuccessfully,* to turn GPU's into a physics accelerator.
Buying Ageia, is merely another go at it. This time however, it's liable to succeed. The Ageia PPU's are not actually all that extensive in terms of bandwidth of computing power, and if they're integrated into GPU's it's highly likely they could be simplified somewhat by taking advantage of similar components that already exist in the GPU. The also get access to a good Physics engine, and a R&D team that, when properly funded should be about on par with Havok, which Intel bought some time ago.
So yeah, none of this actually surprises me. In fact I've been waiting for Nvidia to make this move for quite some time. I was actually somewhat surprised they didn't do it any sooner.
If they had just stuck to liscencing software, instead of selling expensive shit, they could have stayed alive. Then again, built in physics would mean more powerful cards, so I guess it's a win-win. No if they could just hurry up and get a dedicated sound and networking solution along with the graphics and physics, we could see a spike in people with good audio and local ethernet faster that 10/100.