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.Next up Carmack comments on Intel’s shiny new toys – Havok and Offset Software. Intel’s always been about the hardware, but its hard to get the message across to people who have no idea what the benefits are of parallel processing. What better way to do it than with a demo of thousands of scrumptiously-rendered objects doing naughty things to each other:

The best way to evangelise your technology is to show somebody something … That’s the best way to lead anybody; it’s by example. They’ll learn the pros and cons of everything directly there and I very much endorse that direction for them.

Carmack however wasn’t so glowing on the topic of NVIDIA and its questionable acquisition of AGEIA. He actually pulls out the “S” word:

That was one of those things where it was a stupid plan from the start and I really hope NVIDIA didn’t pay too much because I found the whole thing disingenuous. Many people from the very beginning said their entire business strategy was to be acquired because it should have been obvious to everybody that the market for an add-in physics card was just not there.

One could argue that there’s still no market for hardware physics. My bet is it’ll just “fade” into the hardware, and end up as another bullet point on the box for your graphics card or CPU.

Of course, id’s main man doesn’t stop there. Loads more await you in the full interview, including info on id Tech 6, the developer’s upcoming glorified tech demo.

John Carmack on id Tech 6, Ray Tracing, Consoles, Physics and more [PC Perspective]

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.

SANTA CLARA, CA — FEBRUARY 4, 2008–NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA), the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AGEIA Technologies, Inc., the industry leader in gaming physics technology. AGEIA’s PhysX software is widely adopted with more than 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony Playstation3, Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii and Gaming PCs. AGEIA physics software is pervasive with over 10,000 registered and active users of the PhysX SDK.

“The AGEIA team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are–creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences,” stated Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. “By combining the teams that created the world’s most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce®-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world.”

“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.

Like graphics, physics processing is made up of millions of parallel computations. The NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GT GPU, with its 128 processors, can process parallel applications up to two orders of magnitude faster than a dual or quad-core CPU.

“The computer industry is moving towards a heterogeneous computing model, combining a flexible CPU and a massively parallel processor like the GPU to perform computationally intensive applications like real-time computer graphics,” continued Mr. Huang. “NVIDIA’s CUDA™ technology, which is rapidly becoming the most pervasive parallel programming environment in history, broadens the parallel processing world to hundreds of applications desperate for a giant step in computational performance. Applications such as physics, computer vision, and video/image processing are enabled through CUDA and heterogeneous computing.”

AGEIA was founded in 2002 and has offices in Santa Clara, CA; St. Louis, MO; Zurich, Switzerland; and Beijing, China.

The acquisition remains subject to customary closing conditions.

More details about the acquisition will be provided during NVIDIA’s quarterly conference call, to be held on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Pacific Time. The Company’s prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer period, which will be limited to questions from financial analysts and institutional investors. To listen to the conference call, please dial 212-231-2901; no password is required. The conference call will also be webcast live (listen-only mode) at the following Web sites: www.nvidia.com and www.streetevents.com.

Replay of the conference call will be available via telephone by calling 800-633-8284 (or 402-977-9140), passcode 21354792, until February 20, 2008. The webcast will be recorded and available for replay until the company’s conference call to discuss its financial results for its first quarter, fiscal 2009.

About AGEIA

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]