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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.
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
Well, that's because they were pondering a similar strategy to Microsoft, and were going to buy Yahoo.
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This won't float unless they bundle it with the next generation GPU. AGEIA haven't been able to get traction with a dedicated card and neither will nVidia, unless a heap of games support it overnight.
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- Purchase Aegia
- Continue selling dedicated Physics addon-cards
- Integrate PPU onto Graphics Cards
- (somewhere along the line, get full Microsoft Direct-Something endorsement/support of dedicated physics processing)
- possibly by licensing to AMD "PPU included on Graphics Card" rights, thusly invoking the power of Least Common Denominator
- Integrate PPU circuitry/logics into GPU (making it faster/more efficient/cheaper than equivalent solution licensed to AMD)
- ?? Profit ??
In the end, for this to *really* succeed, it needs to be a "Least Common Denominator" factor. So it *requires* full support by Microsoft and Direct-X (them being The Big Factors in the games industry). And in order to get full support from The Windows Monopolist, you'll probably (not absolutely necessary, mut it'd make it much easier to convince Microsoft) need to enable AMD/ATI to leverage this technology, to some degree.Remember folks, Nvidia don't need to *kill* AMD/ATI, they only need to stay one or two generations ahead of them in technology. So they *could* license them "last years tech" for use on their cards, to make "Least Common Denominator" not a factor which excludes their latest-get tech implementations.
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The computing industry is seeing a dramatic shift towards single-package parallelism. Yet again, the x86 architecture largely holds back the CPU from becoming more all-purpose and doing GPU and PPU activities. There are actual engineering reasons you can't have a truly general-purpose ASIC (you can with an FPGA, but that would be too slow for the purpose). The GPU and PPU is where the interesting stuff is. They can actually write new macroarchitecture! They can design on-chip parallelism with far greater complexity without the need for a backwards-compatible architecture.
The exciting aspect to this acquisition is the stronger fusion of two companies that have the ability to harness processing power without historical limitations. ATI/AMD really didn't have this, with AMD stuck with x86. Something like Cell is interesting in this space. However, it lacks flexibility in matching up the main core with the secondary cores. Why bring in PowerPC, for that matter?
This will lead to great things. It is fun again to follow computer architecture.
Unless something's changed in the past year or two it's been since I stopped using Nvidia, their drivers always tended to be quite good.
They were Binary-only, but they were good in that they were fast, stable, and supported all the major functions of their cards. Hardly half-assed if you ask me.
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I would disagree with your characterization of the migration to P4 to core as 'quick'. I would also not declare Intel successfully turning around a product that was competitive across the board with AMD until Core 2, when they pulled in the good instruction per clock and the 64 bit instruction sets all together. It took years for Intel to develop something that *almost* completely dominates the AMD equivalents (one could still make a case for the AMD memory architecture at scale, which Intel will counter with QPI this year). And the clock didn't start ticking until AMD forced their hand.
If it takes a company like Intel years to crank out something like that, a company with debatably the top notch fabrication capabilities in the world, what are nVidia's chances, given that only now they are feasibly able to leverage 65 nm fabrication processes for manufacture of their chips. Fabrication processes aren't everything, but it is a decent indicator of how the cards would be stacked for nVidia going into that market.
I personally would love to see nVidia enter the market with a viable offering, if only because I fear AMD is blowing the situation and the market desperately needs comparable vendors to compete, but I'm not optimistic about nVidia's capabilities.
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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.
With physics acceleration, the little things that don't feel real could be done.
Running through grass could cause it to deform and brush the character, and some of it gets stepped on and stays bent down. Or in sports games, each limb could have a better defined clipping box and rules for how it can flex.
Then when two players collide going for a ball, they hit more realistically and don't clip through each other. Especially on the slow motion replays it would look nice.
Or in a racing game, when cars crash, they could really crash. Imagine bodywork deforming and "real" parts going flying, instead of only a flash of sparks.
Also, it would be cool for grenades and other explosives to properly damage the room and buildings in games that want realism. Walls that crumble into rubble. Tables that break into chunks and splinters. Ceilings that collapse when the supports are destroyed or weakened too much.
Then outside, no more indestructible walls. When I ram a truck or tank into an unreinforced building, something actually happens. As in the vehicle crashes through the wall, or continues through the building with momentum.
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.