Nvidia acquires Ageia
Santa Clara (CA) – Nvidia announced that it will acquire Ageia, maker of physics accelerator chips and cards.
Rumors that Ageia is up for sale have been floating around the graphics industry ever since Ageia was founded back in 2002. Now it is official and Nvidia will integrate the technology in its product portfolio.
This move follows the path Nvidia has been taking for years, making quick acquisitions as they come along. Recently, it became apparent that the company needed a driver for its GPU physics plans. With Havok now being part of Intel, Ageia was a target that made sense.
"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."
The acquisition remains subject to customary closing conditions. Financial details of the agreement were withheld.
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i don't know what is worse, ageia being absorbed by nvidia or them sticking around as their own company, we need open standards in upcoming tech like in game physics, not closed off proprietary crap.
gamers get ready to be screwed around the next few years.
"According to Richard Huddy, who joined AMD when it acquired graphics chip company ATI Technologies back in 2006, Havok FX is unlikely to be released at all or power many video games. While AMD admits that there are some games on the horizon that can compute physics effects on GPUs, it is highly unlikely that there will be a significant number of them, unless comprehensive tools for GPU physics are available. In fact, by acquiring Ageia, Nvidia is likely to make those tools available after some time needed for their development. Given that Ageia PhysX SDK (software development kit) is used to create games for all three modern video game consoles – Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 – game developers may gladly jump on the bandwagon and make use of “GeForce-accelerated PhysX” when it comes to PC versions of their games."
makes sense to me