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NVIDIA To Buy AGEIA
The two companies announced today that NVIDIA will acquire PhysX maker AGEIA; terms were not disclosed. The Daily Tech is one of the few covering the news to go much beyond the press release, mentioning that AMD considered buying AGEIA last November but passed, and that the combination positions NVIDIA to compete with Intel on a second front, beyond the GPU — as Intel purchased AGEIA competitor Havok last September. While NVIDIA talked about supporting the PhysX engine on their GPUs, it's not clear whether AGEIA's hardware-based physics accelerator will play any part in that. AMD declared GPU physics dead last year, but NVIDIA at least presumably begs to differ. The coverage over at PC Perspectives goes into more depth on what the acquisition portends for the future of physics, on the GPU or elsewhere.
Games are great at motivating the development of better video cards, and to some extent bus speeds, processors and other non-gaming-specific components. This is a good thing, though I have some old-man opinions on how Moore's Law is spoiling many developers.
That being said, I don't believe games drive the adoption of hardware as much as you might be thinking. As a case in point, look at Vista. Ugly and bloated, yes, but perforce nearly everywhere. And the minimum requirements for Aero (which is the one feature your average user is going to jump on -- ooh, it's pretty!) are going to do more to push the next large jump in base video card standards than any given game.
Retailers don't have enough fiscal incentives to stop pushing Vista, even if they do try to gain positive PR by selling Ubuntu or XP on a few low-end models. And if they're pushing Vista, they want to support the pretty interface the public expects. By making hardware-accelerated rendering a practical requirement of the OS, Microsoft has raised the bar of the "minimum acceptable" video card.
Right now we see physics cards as a niche product, barely supported. It has been the same with all technical developments. But if we're heading toward 3D interfaces (which I believe we are,)then physics can only play an increasing roll in such an environment. If that should become the case, then a dedicated processor will be much more valuable then assigning a generic CPU core to try and handle the calculations.
With the current PC architecture, the CPU has to send data to the Physics card, read the data back, then finally send it down to the GPU. This would have to be done for things like character animation (ragdoll motion), particle systems for visual effects (bouncing off the scenery/characters). Ideally, you would want the Physics processor to have a direct path to the GPU. Then you could avoid two of these steps.
And if nothing else, Nvidia also get a team of engineers who have worked together and have both DSP and current game industry technology experience.
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Don't forget that PhysX has software out there, too. It hasn't been doing well against Havok, but it's obviously in NVidia's best interests to promote the use of physics engines in games, seeing as they could provide the hardware acceleration for them. I expect the PhysX engine will soon have the ability to use NVidia GPUs, and it will pushed as a more viable competitor to Havok, especially since Intel cancelled Havok FX.
I don't think you are thinking grand enough. I remember the days where you didn't need a dedicated graphics card to play games and I'm only 21. You really didn't get improved game play per say but it did look a heck of a lot better. A dedicated physics processor though has the potential to vastly improve game play and realism.
Imagine instead of designers creating models of buildings they actually built them. That is a brick building had individual bricks all stacked on each other. Whenever you hit it with an explosive it would actually crumble like a real building or burn like a real building. That is a lot of calculations which a general CPU isn't the best at.
The thing is not enough people have PPUs in their computers so you can't include it into core game play yet. Hopefully nVidia acquiring Ageia will allow them to start bundling it with their GPUs or even better yet offer it embedded on their motherboards. While graphics are easily scaled, game play elements are not. I wouldn't be surprised if you see PPUs being crucial to the game on consoles before PCs.
There's nothing stopping you from buying a low-end PC and installing a real GPU. AFAIK, most systems with integrated graphics still have a PCI Express slot so you can upgrade.
I also don't see any gouging going in in gaming PCs. I recently built a $1000 gaming PC and prebuilt models with similar specs were selling for $1100-1200, which is not much of a markup.
The biggest problem in FPS game physics at the moment is a ridiculously trivial one:
When the player moves forward he pushes whatever is under him forward.
I'm not kidding, try standing on something and moving. In reality there's no real problem, as long as the centre of gravity of you+object is under the object's base. If it's light enough, you might kick it out behind you. In a game, 99% of the time you will kick the object under you forwards and out from under you.
Try standing on a barrel in Half-Life 2 for example. The game even gives you a puzzle at the start where you have to stack crates to get through a window, where you can notice this problem.