Published in Graphics

Nvidia has Ageia, so what now?

by on06 February 2008

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Opinion: The way it’s meant to be forced


Nvidia has agreed to acquire Ageia and we were not that surprised with this move, but this is what we believe will happen.

Nvidia has a very bad record of acquiring companies and destroying them afterward and we will mention just a few of them: 3DFX, Portal Player and ULI. Well, what Nvidia traditionally does is to try to integrate the new company in Nvidia and assimilate it to its Borg collective.

Ageia will be something different, as Ageia is the only strong Physics hardware brand in the industry and this is why Nvidia bought them at first place.

Nvidia actually has a mechanism to make Physics works and it is called The Way it’s Meant to be Played. This part of Nvidia is very capable of convincing publishers and developers to take the Nvidia angle and with some extra effort Nvidia can do it with Ageia.

Ageia's biggest problem was that Unreal Tournament 3 failed to be the next big thing; but don’t worry, Nvidia can and will fix it in 2008. Now finally Nvidia has something that DAAMIT hasn’t, a new PhysX that it can implement in its software and hardware.

I was one of the first journalists to see the cool demos back in 2005 and even back then it was easy to know that the company was meant to be sold to the highest bidder. Nvidia needed such a toy and they got the deal.

Intel has Havok, which is number one in physics in games, and AMD will probably develop something if it finds it necessary but we guess that PhysX won't be that important by early 2009 or even later. Nvidia will try to make it happen sooner, but it simply takes time. 

Last modified on 11 February 2008
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