NVIDIA to Acquire Ageia (PhsyX)

[Kabab]

Exciting stuff!

Nvidia is really buying up alot of tech will be interesting to see what the end result is!

[Larrikin]

Exciting stuff!

Nvidia is really buying up alot of tech will be interesting to see what the end result is!

Autodesk buys NVIDIA :)

[dreamymike]

I think Nvidia is trying to get a better position to compete with AMD and Intel. As CPU and GPU are becoming part of the same chip, Nvidia have to be strong with their hardware and software components (Mental Ray).

It seems that consolidation in CG industry is far from being over, I saw another annoncement about Adobe and Maxon Cinema 4D tour.
I would not be surprised if Adobe bought Maxon or some other 3D company in a few months.

http://www.maxoncomputer.com/tours2008/adobe/

[Walli]

Maxon was already bought long time ago, by Nemetschek.

[LucentDreams]

this is the second year of them doing the tour heck adobe didn't have a booth at siggraph last year they just did a simple demo at the maxon booth, but it doesn't mean anything they are business partners they work well together they like to split budgets up with each other saving a pretty bug and getting focus form both compsnies user groups. Its smart business but nothing to do with buyout or merger. Nemetschek is a big company and maxon's one of their strongest and fastest growing components theres little reason for them to sell.



Anyways, back on topic. I agree the main thing is expanding their horizons to compete with AMd and Intel. I'm sure its only a matter of time before we get Nvidia motherboards that have specialized processors for phsysic and graphics and CPU based standard computing.

But definitely having PhysX and Nvidia all in one company will defintley help them in dominating the game market. And for the next generation console who wouldnt' want to deal with the company that has the best graphics and the best physics.

[FreakWizz]

Autodesk buys NVIDIA :)

ROFL, Umm Nvidia is much more likely to buy Autodesk, than Vice Versa....
Nvida is much, much larger than Autodesk, and has much deeper pockets.

We can expect to see Ageia PhysX, running around 4x better on CUDA based Nvidia based cards, and less PPU talk from Intel/AMD. Lightwave3D already has Ageia hardware accelerated plugin, than can use the Ageia PPU cards, or work via the Nvidia GPU using CUDA. This buy-up makes a lot of sense.

[enygma]

I wouldn't say much much larger. Larger, yes. Massively larger? If you go by their market capitalization, NVIDIA is only 68% larger.

Anyways, I am not surprised to see this happen. I've personally been a big proponent of utilizing the GPU for the same purpose that PhysX was designed for. This sees 2 things happen. NVIDIA gets a good team of hardware engineers, and the IP for PhysX that they can now do a CUDA version of it, and run on their newer GPUs. The design of their GeForce 8 series GPUs set them up perfectly for an acquisition like this.

I see good things happening with this.

[FreakWizz]

I wouldn't say much much larger. Larger, yes. Massively larger? If you go by their market capitalization, NVIDIA is only 68% larger.

Well we can argue semantics i guess... but 70% larger, is ummm quite a bit larger IMO.
And definately won't be seeing Autodesk buying Nvidia anytime soon. Ask the same question next year, and Nvidia will be worth substanially more than Autodesk will of gained in the same timeframe. Nvidia will move from strength to strength.

Anyways, I am not surprised to see this happen. I've personally been a big proponent of utilizing the GPU for the same purpose that PhysX was designed for. This sees 2 things happen. NVIDIA gets a good team of hardware engineers, and the IP for PhysX that they can now do a CUDA version of it, and run on their newer GPUs. The design of their GeForce 8 series GPUs set them up perfectly for an acquisition like this.

I see good things happening with this.

Totally Agree, both the Mental Images and Ageia buyups are good things to buy for Nvidia.
Ageia does have some talented staff and engineers, the technology does already work with Nvidia's CUDA, and it will help their markets in multiple areas... It's a shame Nvidia cannot get CUDA supported under Vista however.... :(

[enygma]

Regarding Vista, I think there just wasn't enough support from developers. I know when they went from CUDA 1.0 to 1.1, they added the support for XP 64, but still nothing for Vista, so I could imagine that barely anybody filled out the form on their site for Vista support. Personally I don't really care. I know that now that CUDA supports both Windows and Linux 64bit, I can use all of my Teslas properly.

Now just make the Ageia stuff multi GPU, and work in Maya, and I'll be a very happy person... ;)

[switchblade327]

I'm no fan of consolidation but I think this is great news. Ageia would've gone the way of the dodo without this; not enough people are willing to buy a seperate card just for physics that only some games take advantage of. But if they add the PhysX chip to GeForce graphics cards, they'll wind up in a lot more hands and thus a lot more devs will bother to use them. Everyone wins.

Except ATI.

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