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AMD has considered buying Ageia
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 22nd November 2007
Ageia may find itself at the centre of a bidding war, as interest in game physics is on the increase.
Richard Huddy, AMD’s head of worldwide developer relations, said that “we’ve had that discussion, yes,” when asked about the possibility of buying Ageia. “It’s a discussion that goes around every three months – someone turns to me and says ‘why don’t we buy Ageia?’ and I go through the arguments about why we should and why we shouldn’t.”
The problem for AMD is that Ageia will probably command quite a high asking price, and given the fact that AMD is still heavily in debt following the $5.4 billion purchase of ATI last year, the company probably won’t be able to afford it. It’s likely to not be the only company involved in a potential acquisition and Huddy said he wouldn’t be surprised if the same discussion had gone on at other players in this market, including archrivals Nvidia.
Ever since Intel announced its intentions to buy Havok, we have been asking AMD, Intel and Nvidia what they each think will happen to GPU physics. Intel told us that it didn’t expect things to change once the acquisition was completed, but AMD seems to think otherwise, as it was widely reported yesterday that the company believes GPU physics is dead.
“From Intel’s point of view, there is no reason why they would want to have that physics supported on the GPU any further, so all those conversations [with Havok] have ground to a halt,” said Huddy in an interview with CustomPC.
This came as a surprise to us, especially considering the fact that Valve’s Source engine is using GPU-accelerated physics in some capacity in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. This is a game that AMD is backing, as the game comes free with many AMD ATI Radeon graphics cards today, and there’s ATI logos plastered through the game’s options menu, which state that the game plays better on ATI hardware.
Do you think this would be a good move by AMD, or even another company in the market? Maybe one of the console vendors could snap up Ageia, since its SDK is currently freely available to all platforms. Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Comments (12)Stats: 0.027 seconds
I would rather a GPU based Havok solution, from what ive seen of ageia physics they are very buggy (ut3 stretching limbs etc), havok isn't great either, nothing i've seen has touched the Karma physics in UT2004, but best of a bad bunch i guess.
Not really.
They( Intel, amd, nvidia...) have already found out that the physics effect is doing a increasingly significant job in gaming, and such importance would inrease faster in furture together with the increasingly powerful hardwares.
AMD would never want to lose a a big tech advantage, especially about gaming currently.
I didn't think I was that close to the truth.
I think AMD may try to do this as it would be helpful in the long term and may leave Nvidia out in the cold (AMD and intel will be able to do CPU+GPU+PPU+Chipset, and Nvidia can only do GPU+Chipset)
Short team though is the bigger problem as I think it would be hard for them to go into bigger debt at the moment.
My thoughts exactly.
However, the last time they tried that (3DNow!) the uptake was less than spectacular.
Personally I think it's not a good move for them at the moment and thus unlikely.