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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.
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.