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NVIDIA's acquisition of Ageia has prompted questions about the future of physics processing in PC gaming, and NVIDIA has begun to reveal its plans. The graphics giant revealed that the Ageia PhysX card's capabilities and instruction set will soon be available in software on all GeForce 8-series cards, thus bringing physics acceleration via the PhysX API into the mainstream.
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's quarterly financial results conference call featured the announcement that NVIDIA will fold Ageia's PhysX engine into CUDA. CUDA is NVIDIA's API to give programmers access to GPU hardware for general-purpose applications. The Tech Report broke the story, commenting on the upcoming update.
Ageia made waves with the launch of its original PhysX card, and expectations for its success were high, but the struggling device has seen little adoption. This has been attributed to a chicken-and-egg problem; developers are afraid to use the engine because of low user support, and gamers aren't buying the device because games don't support it. NVIDIA's software support could now bring PhysX gaming to the masses on GeForce hardware.
On the high end, NVIDIA feels that physics acceleration in the GPU will provide a worthwhile rationale for multi-GPU hardware solutions like SLI and Crossfire, using the additional muscle for physics processing and putting second and even third graphics cards into gamers' computers.
It is not known if NVIDIA will continue to produce the hardware version of the PhysX card, or if it will continue to license the PhysX engine to competing graphics vendors. If not, hardware segmentation between PhysX on CUDA and ATI's competing physics hardware solution could make life very complicated for gamers. The future of graphics comparison may include separate consideration of images and physics, possibly including a patchwork of game support for different physics APIs. Eventually, the market will coalesce to near-universal game support for a set of APIs available on nearly all cards, but it's not clear what will happen in the meantime.
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