Nvidia finalises Ageia deal, details future plans

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 14th February 2008

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has said that he already has engineers working to port the PhysX SDK to CUDA.

Nvidia has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Ageia Technologies, just nine days after first making the deal public.

During yesterday's financial earnings call, president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that "Our strategy is to take the Ageia physics engine, which has been integrated into tools and games all over the world, and we're going to put the Ageia physics engine onto CUDA.

"You heard my comments that CUDA has now shipped with 50 million GeForce 8 series processors and over the next several years, we'll ship a few hundred million more. The ability to port the physics engine on top of CUDA and accelerate the physics is going to add a tonne more value to gamers around the world," continued Huang.

"Our expectation is that this is going to encourage people to buy even better GPUs. 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.

"I'm very enthusiastic about the work that we're doing here and the game developers are really excited about it," said Huang. "Finally they are able to get a physics engine accelerated into a very large population of gamers. And so I think this combination between us and Ageia really kick-started the physics industry."

In response to another question regarding the post acquisition strategy, Huang revealed that he already has engineers working hard to port the physics engine to CUDA and that he's "going to throw a lot of resources at it."

"I wouldn't be surprised if this helps our GPU sales even advance, and the reason for that is in the end, it's just going to be a software download, he explained. "Every single GPU that is CUDA enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes."

Are you looking forward to more physics being implemented into PC games or do you think it'll be a passing fad? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.