NVIDIA to Acquire AGEIA Technologies

[Phopojijo]

of course you'll have to buy a new card. there's more money in a new card than new drivers. but anyway, the new card [IRONY]will be a gazillion times better than anything Ageia even thought of in their wildest dreams and it will be the all-in-one solution for everything[/IRONY]. or something like that...

as for nvidia buying amd, i find that hard to imagine. i mean amd now includes ati. so nvidia would pretty much have a monopoly. apart from that, just imagine the huge amount of money can they even do that?!

No -- AMD is worth approximately just as much as nVidia -- it would need to be a non-hostile merger.

It's true that game developers are the ones really losing here.

I can be cynical and see where that might happen -- but frankly I think this will not make devs lose out. I think the 3 mutually-exclusive physics solution that was trying to get pushed back in '05 was going to hurt devs. Now we're down to 2... that could easily be standardized.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

They really serve two different purposes. Havok is less intensive, less accurate and AGEIA is more intensive and more accurste. The problem is that you don't get great high end performance out of wither one unless you have HARDWARE capability.

 

[kafros]

I think if anything nvidia would produce a "combo" card before integrating it into their chipset.

I would expect them to start doing so with the new high-end cards. From a consumer point of view, buying two cards has not really taken-off.

This aquisition is a good thing, because it will expand the gamers base that have PhysX capable H/W and bring physics into the core gameplay and not just as a minor last minute add-on for the game tech sheet.