BFG Technology to Sell Physics Accelerators

by Anton Shilov
09/01/2005 | 11:16 PM

AGEIA Technologies, the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games and BFG Technologies a <%BANNER[article]%>U.S. supplier of graphics cards, announced today that they have entered into a retail distribution agreement. BFG is the third company after ASUSTeK Computer and Club3D, who agreed to sell cards that accelerate physics in certain games.

Under the contract, BFG Technologies will manufacture, sell, market and distribute personal computer add-in cards powered by the AGEIA PhysX processor to retail, e-tail and distributors in the United States, Canada and the European Union member states.

BFG Technologies plans to offer standalone PCI cards with the AGEIA PhysX processor and 128MB of local memory, which is used for storing and processing physics data during game play.  Products will be available at the end of this year.  Pricing and other product details will be announced at that time.

AGEIA’s PhysX is the world’s first Physics Processing Unit (PPU), which offloads software physics processing from central processing units and graphics processing units to it. The architecture of the PhysX PPU is tailored for multi-threaded processing of vertexes, which allows game creators to develop detailed, soft and precise animation and simulation of movements, hair, clothing, liquids, fluids and other. Currently AGEIA PhysX is the world’s first and only dedicated physics processing unit, but the company expects more startups to offer similar technology.

The cards based on the new AGEIA PhysX processor will start sampling in Q3 2005, and when they appear in retail in Q4 their price is supposed to be between $249 and $299, it was revealed earlier this year.