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Gearbox: The Wii U Will Get The Best-Looking Version Of Aliens: Colonial Marines Even though his presence in the industry has declined somewhat since the release of Doom 3, and his passions have shifted from polygons and frame buffers to mobile phones and space rockets, it’s always pure win reading interviews with id’s John Carmack. Mention any topic and the man has something compelling to say.
PC Perspective managed to get a hold of the programming guru and quiz him on the latest happenings in the industry, including the recent purchase of AGEIA by NVIDIA and Intel’s consuming of Offset Software and its luscious graphics engine and physics middleware vendor Havok.
Early on in the piece Carmack gives ray tracing a tongue lashing and fortifies his opinion on rasterisation, the dominant form of 3D rendering. According to Carmack, the argument that the former scales better than the latter is “ridiculous”. He even throws in a chunk of info on voxels, which our good friend Ken Silverman loves to bits.
NVIDIA today confirmed rumblings that they were looking to buy physics-centric AGEIA Technologies. NVIDIA saied an agreement to acquire the industry leaders in gaming physics, though the acquisition still remains subject to some closing conditions.
More details about the deal will shake out during NVIDIA’s upcoming quarterly conference call, set for Feb. 13.
While AGEIA appears to continue to struggle breaking into the mainstream PC market, they’ve made significant in-roads into the console market with 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and PC. The company has more than 10,000 registered and active users of their PhysX software development kit as well.
“NVIDIA is the perfect fit for us. They have the world’s best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience,” said Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of AGEIA.
Full release on the jump. I wonder if NVIDIA would try to come up with a way to incorporate the PhysX engine into a graphics card, instead of requiring two pieces of hardware? Maybe that’s not possible, actually.
Ageia’s PhysX cards, specialised components that support in-game physics just as a video card supports graphics, haven’t really taken the world by storm. Why? My guess is that, among other reasons, it’s tough enough for consumers to pony up $US 200 when they need a new graphics card, let alone an extra $US 130-$US 180 on top of that. But in Japan, PhysX will have a chance to address the price barrier. Because Japanese graphics card manufacturer ELSA is going to begin selling PhysX cards for just 6000 yen (or about $US 50).
And when ordering a new computer, checking a $US 50 box rings of “impulse buy” a lot more than a card running three times that price. Seriously, $US 50 in computers is the grocery store checkout equivalent of a Mars bar and an issue of Cosmo. (Which, by the way, makes for a great Friday night if you are short on plans).
PhysX Cards At $50 In Japan [digitalbattle]
Egads. This well and truly marks the end of AGEIA and its PhysX hardware physics processor. Havok already has a commanding lead – or should that be a monopoly – on the physics middleware business, and this will only make it bigger, better and more ragdoll-y.
So, it’s up to Unreal Tournament 3 to bring back the biff for AGEIA – but I don’t see that happening. Take BioShock, based on Unreal Engine 3, which includes PhysX by default. 2K Australia/2K Boston went to the trouble of replacing PhysX with Havok. When you consider the former is free while the latter is not… well, it’s bad tidings for AGEIA indeed.
Full press release after the jump.
