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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.
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.