Nvidia completes Ageia purchase - locks out ATI

Posted at: 6:01am 14th February 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Plans to sell many more GPUs for physics as well as graphics

It was just over a week ago that Nvidia announced its plans to buy Ageia, but the acquisition has already been completed. In a statement today, Nvidia proudly announced that 'it has completed the acquisition of AGEIA Technologies, Inc., the industry leader in gaming physics technology.'

So that's it folks - Intel now owns Havok and Nvidia owns Ageia. Where does that leave AMD in the world of physics? Back in December, Nvidia's vice president of content relations, Roy Taylor, told Custom PC that he wanted a 'non-proprietary, free API' for physics, which could help AMD / ATI too.

However, when announcing Nvidia's earnings for the fiscal year 2008, Nvidia's CEO and president, Jen-Hsun Huang said that the plan was to 'put the Ageia physics engine onto CUDA.' CUDA is Nvidia's own C-compiler for programming its own GeForce 8-series GPUs, which makes the whole non-proprietary, free API thing a bit redundant now.

It's not surprising, considering Nvidia's aggressive nature, but this is going to leave AMD / ATI in a bit of a quandary when it comes to physics processing in the future. Huang also reckons it's going to make people buy noatloads of GPUs, saying 'It might and probably will encourage people to buy a second GPU for the SLI slot and for the highest-end gamers, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs, potentially two for graphics and one for physics or one for graphics and two for physics, or any dynamic combination thereof.'