Good or Bad? Its yourself to decide. The not-so-famous Ageia PHYsX cards which were based on the Havok engine are now a part of Nvidia. This will now see more realistic physics and graphics running together through only one device- THE GPU. The integrated physics with the GPU will thus give more physics power to the games and applications making a further step into evolution of virtual reality.
NVIDIA likely will not make major changes initially with Ageia and its products. This means that the hardware accelerators will still be on sale, and offered by both Asus and BFG at this time. We may see a few other NVIDIA partners pick up card designs though and market them for themselves. If there is one thing that NVIDIA is pretty good at, it is marketing. With the company now in charge of marketing standalone physics accelerators, we can bet that we will start hearing about it much more aggressively now.
Will the dedicate PPU continue or be integrated?
NVIDIA’s developer relations are incredibly strong, and there are some very talented programmers involved in the program. Leveraging some of that programming power towards PhysX would likely be very helpful. NVIDIA would be much more aggressive in selling the underlying physics software to its gaming partners as well. Within the next few months we would see a lot more support for Ageia, perhaps not so much in how well the software works, but rather how many more game developers will adopt it and support it.
Ageia will likely start out as its own division within NVIDIA, but perhaps over time they will migrate it under one of the broader divisions. Details are sketchy at the moment, but until NVIDIA is able to dig deeper into the architecture of the Ageia products, they will wait to see where it would best be used. With NVIDIA looking to release more general processors, the technology that Ageia brings could fit very well in with their future plans.
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