by Anton Shilov
02/05/2008 | 11:38 PM
The acquisition of Ageia Technologies by Nvidia Corp. was hardly a surprise, but it did came relatively unexpected primarily because neither Nvidia needed Ageia in the short-term, nor Ageia showed signs that it needed to be taken over. But what’s done is done and X-bit labs asked several questions to Michael Steele, who is vice president of marketing at Ageia, about the future of the company and PhysX.
There has always been a sacred circle for Ageia: on the one hand it needed to sell as many PhysX PPU add-in-cards to end-users to make game developers interested in implementing support for the hardware-accelerated physic into their titles, on the other hand, few end-users are interested in buying a hardware that will only be supported some time in future. As a result, Ageia PhysX PPU have not become popular at all, unlike PhysX SDK, which is used relatively widely during game development for the latest video game consoles.
But maybe this will change now that Ageia is a part of Nvidia Corp., currently the largest supplier of discrete graphics processing units (GPUs) for personal computers (PCs)?
X-bit labs: Why did you feel it was the time to become a part of a larger company?
Did you feel that the model, which relies on dedicated physics processing unit (PPU) hardware that should be acquired for $100 - $200 separately turned out to be unsuccessful?
Michael Steele: We’re happy that we were so instrumental in establishing physics as a meaningful category in PC and console gaming. We believe strongly in hardware-accelerated physics and believe the time is right to make an aggressive move forward. By combining Ageia’s PhysX technology with Nvidia’s industry leading GPU architectures, we’ll ensure that gamers and developers alike take advantage of the most compelling physics on the market.
X-bit labs: What benefits can collaboration of Ageia and Nvidia bring the whole industry?
Michael Steele: Well, it’s clear that physics is one of the next great opportunities for gaming innovation. It is a substantial and visceral differentiator for game developers and a tremendous improvement to the gaming experience. The combination of Nvidia and Ageia technologies will deliver that next-generation experience. Everyone wins! Developers will now have a powerful industry leader dedicated to enabling physics across multiple platforms with an eye toward open access to the technology. Gamers will get the benefit of an increasingly better game experience and the opportunity for some dazzling GPU-enhanced physics.
Nvidia has a long history of acquisitions, but despite of this the company does not seem to have a strict policy regarding companies it acquires. For example, when it acquired 3dfx, it ceased to sell Voodoo graphics cards almost immediately and there was barely any support for 3dfx graphics cards going forward. On the other hand, when Nvidia took over MediaQ, it re-branded certain products and continued their sales and support.
What will happen to PhysX and the support of its early adopters? Perhaps, there are more dedicated Ageia PhysX physics processing units incoming?
X-bit labs: Does the acquisition mean that there will be no more Ageia PhysX dedicated physics processing units and all the physics acceleration will be carried out by Nvidia GeForce GPUs? Perhaps, future Nvidia GeForce GPUs could integrate certain parts of PPUs?
Michael Steele: As part of Nvidia, we are still committed to hardware-accelerated physics and will support current customer commitments to the PhysX processor, as well as future business, as demand dictates. That being said, we will also begin work in parallel to enable physics on a GeForce processor as soon as possible. New GeForce processor architectures will definitely be something to be reckoned with and we see PhysX as a great addition to enabling Nvidia to continue driving the game experience.
X-bit labs: Will you continue to support existing PhysX PPU owners? If yes, for how long?
Michael Steele: We are still committed to hardware-accelerated physics and will support existing PPU customer commitments, as well as future business, as demand dictates.
X-bit labs: Can we interpret this claim as an indirect promise to release more Ageia PhysX dedicated PPUs in future, if Nvidia feels there is enough demand for it?
Michael Steele: As long as there is demand, Nvidia will do what’s right to support it. Obviously, all of Ageia’s customers from end-user, to system vendor, to console maker, to developer, are the same as Nvidia’s and we’ll do what’s best to support them in driving physics forward and enabling them to be successful with the technology. I would expect demand to continue growing since the addition of GPU physics will open up a much bigger market for game developers and should lead to many more PhysX-driven games in the future.
X-bit labs: Will there be any PhysX-branded physics accelerators based on Nvidia GeForce GPUs that will not be intended for graphics, but will be designed strictly for physics acceleration?
Michael Steele: At this early stage, I can't say for sure what all the final products will look like. I can say that we are committed to adding GPUs as a great way to enable PhysX.
X-bit labs: Can you compare performance of PhysX PPU against Nvidia GeForce GPU; say, vs. GeForce 8600 GTS or GeForce 8800 GT?
Michael Steele: Again, it’s too soon to comment on the specifics. We’re convinced that Nvidia enables the world's best GPU’s for a variety of entertainment and general-purpose applications and will continue to evolve the processor architecture to address a growing number of new applications like physics. Ageia is an expert at enabling multithreaded hardware-accelerated physics in any form. Together, we will develop the best physics-enabled platforms with our next-generation software and hardware.
Allegedly next-generation Ageia PhysX add-on-board
It is interesting to note that back in August ’07 several picture of what was claimed to be a next-generation dedicated physics accelerator from Ageia were published on the Internet. For some reason, the board featured a cooling system with Nvidia logotype on it as well as a SLI-like interface.
It should also be noted that video games will hardly start to support GPU physics overnight: development cycles last for years and quality implementation of a feature requires this feature to be a part of the project from day one. Therefore, one could hardly expect high-quality titles to utilize GeForce-accelerated PhysX or PPU-accelerated PhysX shortly after the transaction between Ageia and Nvidia takes place.
Perhaps, the main reason why Ageia could not make its PhysX PPU exceptionally popular is because it could not manage to sell many add-on boards. It is indisputable fact that Nvidia has much broader install base with its GeForce graphics processors, hence, allowing them to compute physics effects will catalyze game developers to implement better quality physics effects.
The question, however, is whether Ageia’s PhysX technology will be able to take advantage of GPUs in general, which means that ATI Radeon, Intel Corp.’s graphics cores and S3 Graphics’ graphics chips, besides Nvidia’s own GeForce will be supported; or Nvidia will only let game developers to compute physics on the GeForce. In the former case Nvidia will enable an open standard to develop physics effects that rely on graphics chips, thus, PhysX will eventually compete against Microsoft’s Direct Physics. In the latter case Nvidia will only allow physics to be computed on GeForce graphics processing units, hence, far not all game developers will make use of it.
We do not know many open or industry-standard technologies developed by Nvidia and used by other companies, which may compete against the Santa Clara, California-based graphics firm, except MXM standards for mobile graphics sub-systems and extreme memory profiles (XMP). Virtually all technologies that the company develops remain proprietary. Nevertheless, Nvidia should understand quite well that without contributing to the industry, some of its efforts will never turn out to be popular.
Keeping in mind that GPU physics is about increasing importance of graphics processing units in general, it may be possible that GPU PhysX technology by Ageia will become, maybe, to some degree, open to companies outside Nvidia. Another option would be to increase importance of Nvidia GeForce and close the platform for other GPU vendors. In that case far not all games even among them that belong to The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program will utilize PhysX GPU physics effects technology.
X-bit labs: Will Ageia PhysX SDK will be able to take advantage only of PhysX PPUs and GeForce GPUs? Or it will be able to use x86 CPUs and ATI Radeon GPUs?
Michael Steele: We’ll continue to support the current SDK and will immediately begin the work to accelerate PhysX with our GPUs. We’ll also continue to support CPUs in keeping with the heterogeneous compute model that Nvidia has been extending with its increasingly flexible and powerful GPUs and CUDA programming environment.
Nvidia is committed to creating a development environment that enables the pervasive use of PhysX technology and innovative implementations of physics in gaming on today’s PPU, CPU and in the future, the GPU. Of course, we’ll also continue to provide the best complete platform of both software and hardware to developers and gamers.
X-bit labs: Will “GeForce-accelerated PhysX”require a standalone GeForce board, or physics processing will rely on a single GPU with graphics?
Michael Steele: It’s too early to comment on how this will be rolled out. But we expect it to happen as soon as possible. Consider that Ageia designed its multithreaded PhysX software specifically for hardware acceleration in massively parallel environments. Nvidia’s GPUs are well-suited to take advantage of PhysX software and Ageia’s expertise in that environment. Also, it is clear that Nvidia is committed to enabling pervasive physics through open platform initiatives.
X-bit labs: What do you actually mean by open platform initiatives here? Does it mean that Nvidia will keep developing PhysX SDK and it will support x86 microprocessors, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3? Or does it mean that PhysX SDK will be compatible with all of the above as well as DirectX 10 GPUs in general?
Michael Steele: It means that Nvidia wants to be open in its further development of PhysX software in order to enable as many platforms as possible on both PC and console. Nvidia understands better than anyone the need to enable a large and unrestricted market for game developers. I don’t think anyone will question their unique capabilities to support the development community. Enabling a physics eco-system and then delivering the best hardware for that environment is good for gaming.
X-bit labs: Thank you very much for your detailed and first-hand answers! We wish Ageia all the best as a part of Nvidia Corp. and good luck with new challenges!