Mass Physics!

[vine]

the word on the street is that Texas Instruments is acquiring ATi from AMD, or will be buying AMD outright. AMD have a bit of a cash-flow problem.

[vine]

the word on the street is that Texas Instruments is acquiring ATi from AMD, or will be buying AMD outright. AMD have a bit of a cash-flow problem.

[Spectre8]

wow.... I know they've got problems, but didn't know it was that bad...

[Isthiriel]

Originally Posted by taldoren

An Ageia based Physics card will not offer any benifit to Crysis nor majority of other games. Crysis I belive uses there own Physics engine, not Ageia nor Havoc, however there was talk of 1, Crytek offering support to PPU add on cards with there engine, and 2, of Ageia tring to provide a legacy mode that would allow the PPU functions to work with any major physics engines.

Crysis doesn't, GRAW, UT3 and MoH:A do.

Anything that asks whether you want to install the PhysX driver when you're installing it will and Ageia has the complete list on their website.

(1) is a possibilty. (2) is ... very unlikely. Source (HL2, TF2, CS:S ...) nominally uses the Havok engine but it is so modified that a drop-in replacement for the Havok dll that instead linked to Ageia's hardware would fail.

Originally Posted by taldoren

However, as ATi is looking (maybe completed now) at buying out Ageia, there has been no confirmation of the expected development plans as yet.

Right idea, wrong cat^H^Hompany.

[Spectre8]

Yeah just read that myself! Interesting times.

[Arkon]

I just thought I would add this here guys

Internode News

In an interesting development, it has been announced that NVIDIA, one of the world's biggest and best-known names in visual computing technology, will acquire AGEIA Technologies, the industry leader in games physics.

More than 140 games utilising AGEIA's PhysX software are currently either on-shelf or in-development for gaming PCs, as well as the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, and the move further concretes NVIDIA's stance in the games industry.

Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of AGEIA, founded in 2002 and boasting offices in the US, Switzerland and China, explains:

"NVIDIA is the perfect fit for us. They have the world's best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience."

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA continues:

"The AGEIA team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are — creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences. 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."

NVIDIA, of course, is the developer of the GPU - and their latest, the GeForce 8800GT GPU has 128 processors, meaning it can process paralell applications considerably faster than any dual or even quad-core CPU.

Mr. Huang explains further:

"The computer industry is moving towards a heterogeneous computing model, combining a flexible CPU and a massively parallel processor like the GPU to perform computationally intensive applications like real-time computer graphics. NVIDIA's CUDA™ technology, which is rapidly becoming the most pervasive parallel programming environment in history, broadens the parallel processing world to hundreds of applications desperate for a giant step in computational performance. Applications such as physics, computer vision, and video/image processing are enabled through CUDA and heterogeneous computing."

More details on the acquisition will be revealed later this month during NVIDIA's quarterly conference call - and as soon as we hear news about the clash of the Greek-inspired acronyms, we'll share.

[vine]

nice merger. hopefully they will integrate the physics ship on to the gpu PCB so we wont need two cards