February 6th, 2008

NVIDIA Acquires AGEIA

AGEIA Technologies is known as a specialist in gaming physics and many companies have used its PhysX software in developing over 140 games for PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and personal computers, AGEIA reaching this way more than 10,000 registered users of the PhysX SDK.

Besides this, the company became famous after building the PhysX processor which was the world’s first dedicated hardware physics processor.

On the other hand, NVIDIA, the inventor of graphic processing units which revolutionized the entire gaming industry, becoming the world’s leader in visual computing technologies, has just announced the acquisition of AGEIA which was also focused on creating never-before-seen gaming environments, and the new fusion is to deliver the GefOrce models based on PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers worldwide.

According to AGEIA, the NVIDIA giant has the world’s best parallel computing technology and together with AGEIA’s innovation spirit creates the most powerful combination in this industry.
It didn’t pass long time since the acquisition and the AGEIA physics accelerators’ prices got lower to $100 from $150 in several places.

"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," declared Mr. Huang. "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."

[Thanks for the tip, Codrut Nistor!]