NVIDIA to acquire Ageia Technologies

Tuesday 05th February 2008, 07:07:00 AM, written by Rys

NVIDIA are set to acquire Ageia Technologies, creator of PhysX, bringing acceleration of the technology to their GPU product line.

In an announcement today by the company, NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang said, "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."

Ageia's Manju Hegde chipped in with love for his company's new owners with a quip about how NVIDIA are the "thought leader in GPUs and gaming", and that Ageia and NVIDIA are bound by a common goal to increase the innovation and drive the consumer experience.

More from JHH can be found in the NVIDIA press release.

Word from inside NVIDIA is that discrete PhysX hardware will continue to be developed after the acquisition, and that we should see at least one more specific PhysX accelerator chip released. More news on that as we get it.

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Tagging

nvidia ± physx, ageia, sdk, ppu


Latest Thread Comments (80 total)
Posted by Arun on Thursday, 14-Feb-08 11:05:07 UTC
Shush, with all due respect, Jen-Hsun also seems to think Tri-SLI wasn't released yet! :p Anyway, as per the discussion in the Q407 results thread (Semiconductor Financials forum), I think he's simply confused in believing they can port the full API to GPUs and truly benefit from the existing software install base.

I can believe they could accelerate part of it on the GPU though and perhaps create a new 'effects' path, but I'll simply say that certainly is NOT the strategy I would be adopting here. The physics acceleration scene has already been so underwhelming in recent years that the last thing the industry needs is yet another overhyped but pointless solution, IMO. I still think it'd be much wiser to wait this out until you can actually make it really compelling.

Oh well, it's not like Jen-Hsun or NV's GPU business in general cared about my advice either way, so I'll stop this right here!

Posted by pcchen on Thursday, 14-Feb-08 12:49:54 UTC
I don't think it's entirely impossible. Remember NVIDIA is trying to push CUDA into research area, and many HPC projects are actively looking into using CUDA to do something. Therefore, it's entirely possible that future versions of CUDA will be quite capable of doing more complex physics simulations.

Of course, a fundamental problem is, games are not going to be bound by a specific hardware. This is true for PPU, and is also true for CUDA-capable GPUs. IMHO, earlier possibility of CUDA-enhanced effects will be cosmetic only. This is not actually that bad though. An explosion with 10x particles will look much better. Water waves can also be simulated much better even with current CUDA GPUs.

Game mechanic related physics simulation will still be done on the CPU, until someday there's a standard interface for GPUs to do these things. But as Arun pointed out, the bandwidth/latency limit between PCI Express and main memory is still a major obstacle.

Posted by DegustatoR on Thursday, 14-Feb-08 13:10:14 UTC
I think that CUDA will serve like somewhat of a version 0.5 for standard GPGPU interface which will eventually be included in DX and OGL :)
Much like Cg was for HLSL/GLSL.

Posted by _xxx_ on Thursday, 14-Feb-08 13:36:38 UTC
Also don't forget that "porting" can be very flexible in it's meaning.

Posted by pcchen on Thursday, 14-Feb-08 17:41:04 UTC
Quoting DegustatoR
I think that CUDA will serve like somewhat of a version 0.5 for standard GPGPU interface which will eventually be included in DX and OGL :)
Much like Cg was for HLSL/GLSL.
It would be best if there's a standard streaming processing language for everything, i.e. NVIDIA's GPU, ATI/AMD's GPU, and Larrabee. Actually I don't think CUDA is that different from Brook+. However, even with a common language, you'll still want to optimize your program for specific GPUs because they tend to have quite different performance characteristic.

That's why I think eventually game developers (and even application developers) will more likely to use higher level libraries such as Ageia. For example, suppose that you want to decode JPEG with GPU acceleration, you don't write your own GPU accelerated JPEG decoder, you buy one.

Posted by Davros on Thursday, 14-Feb-08 19:58:54 UTC
quote from the top dude at nvidia:

We're working toward the physics-engine-to-CUDA port as we speak. And we intend to throw a lot of resources at it. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it helps our GPU sales even in advance of [the port's completion]. The reason is, [it's] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes. . . . Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA.

Our expectation is that this is gonna encourage people to buy even better GPUs. It might—and probably will—encourage people to buy a second GPU for their SLI slot. And for the highest-end gamer, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs. Potentially two for graphics and one for physics, or one for graphics and two for physics.

Posted by _xxx_ on Friday, 15-Feb-08 11:53:13 UTC
Quote
or one for graphics and two for physics
LMAO, is crack that easy to get nowadays? :lol:

Posted by Arnold Beckenbauer on Monday, 14-Apr-08 12:36:04 UTC
Nvidia GPU physics engine up and running, almost (http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36915/135/)
Quote
While Intel's Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. If the very likely event that Nvidia’s next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can’t ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.

There was also a demonstration of cloth: A quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme processor was working in 12 fps, while a GeForce 8800 GTS board resulted came in at 200 fps. Former Ageia employees did not compare it to Ageia's own PhysX card, but if we remember correctly, that demo ran at 150-180 fps on an Ageia card.
Actually, there is no word, that they (NV) have "ported" Ageia's PhysX to CUDA to run these tests.

Posted by Arun on Monday, 14-Apr-08 13:15:43 UTC
Quoting Arnold Beckenbauer
Actually, there is no word, that they (NV) have "ported" Ageia's PhysX to CUDA to run these tests.
What do you mean?

Posted by Arnold Beckenbauer on Monday, 14-Apr-08 17:12:44 UTC
Quoting Arun
What do you mean?
Hm, I shouldn't read TG's articles (only). Let's forget it. :sad:
After reading BT's article, I understand it in that way, that NV has run the same PhysX test with and without GPU.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/14/nvidia_analyst_day_-_biting_back_at_intel/5
Quote
Manju Hegde, former CEO of Ageia, then came to the stage to talk about the future of PhysX following Nvidia's recent acquisition of Ageia. Huang described GPU accelerated physics as the second killer application this year. "In my estimation, this will be the second killer app this year. The first one is video editing—we're going to speed that sucker up by 10 or 20 times—and the second will be physics."

...

Hegde said that PhysX was the most pervasive and advanced physics API on the planet, claiming that it's featured in at least 140 titles across all platforms. He also revealed that the PhysX SDK had been completely ported over to CUDA, therefore enabling GPU accelerated physics, in just one month and he claimed that there has been an exponential increase in developer adoption because of >50m installed base of CUDA-ready GPUs.

Whichever way you look at it, physics is going to be an increasingly more important part of the future – we've seen some titles start to really use physics effectively in the past year or so, but we expect that to increase now that there is more horsepower available. Of course, we've not been the biggest fans of PhysX in the past—mainly because of the fact you needed additional hardware to enjoy the real benefits of Ageia's technology, which meant that the effects were usually limited to 'special' levels that nobody without a PhysX card played due to sub-par performance—but this is shaping up to be quite a smart acquisition by Nvidia.

There's still a question mark in my mind though, and that's the ubiquity of CUDA-based GPUs. The code can of course run on the CPU if there isn't a CUDA-ready GPU available in the system, but given the ubiquity of multi-core CPUs, it's impossible to say which way this battle will go. Let's forget about Intel for the moment, because I'm not sure AMD would be too happy about not having GPU accelerated physics in the future. Could we be returning to a situation where certain features of games (or even entire games) will be vendor-specific again like they were in the late 1990s? I really hope not.


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