NVIDIA to Acquire AGEIA Technologies

[Erwin Coumans]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1202161567170.html


PhysX on GeForce Will Bring Amazing Physics Dynamics to Millions of Gamers
For further information, contact:

Michael Hara
Investor Relations
NVIDIA Corporation
(408) 486-2511
mhara@nvidia.com

Derek Perez
Public Relations
NVIDIA Corporation
(408) 486-2512
dperez@nvidia.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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: http://www.nvidia.com and http://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.

[Oscar Civit Flores]

Jackpot!

[Dirk Gregorius]

Interesting. In my opinion the best option for the Ageia cards was/is to integrate them in a graphic card. It will be interesting to see if the next-gen consoles will use nVidia cards. In this case Ageia would be the natural choice for physics engine on a console and there will not be any room for others since they will lack the hardware support and resources. So let's hope the next console generations use ATI or something else

Any rumors on the price?

[Antonio Martini]

So let's hope the next console generations use ATI or something else

like a IBM processor?:)

cheers,
Antonio

[Dirk Gregorius]

Interesting interview. They also mention consoles and Direct Physics from MS. I always thought that the later is only a rumor. Actually I only scanned the article, but I wonder if we can expect physics to go the same way like graphics and soon we need to implement OpenPhysics or DirectPhysics interfaces instead of running our own engines what would be only interesting for hardware vendors?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/editor ... -2008.html

[bone]

Actually I only scanned the article, but I wonder if we can expect physics to go the same way like graphics and soon we need to implement OpenPhysics or DirectPhysics interfaces instead of running our own engines what would be only interesting for hardware vendors?

Graphics has almost come full circle now, in my skewed view of the universe. First everybody wrote their own software engine, then everybody had to use some API which limited the amount of things they could do (triangle-based rendering became so much more efficient than other ideas of the time that everything else was left behind), and now, finally, we've got shaders where the graphics programmer actually has control again.

Can we just skip to the chase and have a useful massively parallel card with a simple and generic interface for math operations? The last thing in the world that anybody needs is a physics API designed by Microsoft.

Personally, I have specific requirements (accuracy, size of world, etc.) that preclude me from using some of the usual game physics shortcuts. I just don't particularly want to be left out on hardware optimizations just because the majority of game programmers have different requirements. Sorry if this sounds like whining, I'm just trying to get my two cents in.

[aboeing]

soon we need to implement OpenPhysics

<plug>Physics Abstraction Layer</plug>
And ofcourse COLLADA Physics...

Can we just skip to the chase and have a useful massively parallel card with a simple and generic interface for math operations?

nVidias CUDA, ATI's close to the metal, do this for the GPU, more general solutions are (open source) lib Sh, and (commerical) RapidMind..

Anyone have any experience with RapidMind btw?

[aboeing]

They are infact doing the obvious and porting PhysX to use CUDA:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/02/14 ... re_plans/1

[KenB]

It will be interesting to see how they manage to deal with parallelism.
The issue is that thermodynamics tells us that we will mainly see data parallelism and stream processing in the future, and this opens for.... Jacobi iterations. Thus, convergence rates and algorithmic efficiency (or energy efficiency) for data parallel physics isn't going to be great just like that - cuda or not.

[Erwin Coumans]

It will be interesting to see how they manage to deal with parallelism.
The issue is that thermodynamics tells us that we will mainly see data parallelism and stream processing in the future, and this opens for.... Jacobi iterations. Thus, convergence rates and algorithmic efficiency (or energy efficiency) for data parallel physics isn't going to be great just like that - cuda or not.

Jacobi iterations are easy and fast indeed, embarrassingly parallel.

Iterative constraint solvers based on PGS/SOR/iterative impulse relaxation method are possible using CUDA efficiently too. Can't give you all details right now, but we plan on describing details, using CUDA, in my upcoming book on real-time rigid body dynamics.

Erwin

[KenB]

Yo! When will this book be out? Topic, publisher?
I'd be happy to proof-read it!

It will be interesting to see how they manage to deal with parallelism.
The issue is that thermodynamics tells us that we will mainly see data parallelism and stream processing in the future, and this opens for.... Jacobi iterations. Thus, convergence rates and algorithmic efficiency (or energy efficiency) for data parallel physics isn't going to be great just like that - cuda or not.

Jacobi iterations are easy and fast indeed, embarrassingly parallel.

Iterative constraint solvers based on PGS/SOR/iterative impulse relaxation method are possible using CUDA efficiently too. Can't give you all details right now, but we plan on describing details, using CUDA, in my upcoming book on real-time rigid body dynamics.

Erwin

[Erwin Coumans]

Yo! When will this book be out?

Hopefully next year.

Topic?

Title is: Real-Time Rigid Body Dynamics
It will include discrete and continuous collision detection, iterative constraint solvers, parallelism, and some appendix on Bullet and other open source physics resources etc.

Publisher?

Morgan Kaufmann, Elsevier

I'd be happy to proof-read it!

Thanks for the offer, I'll remember that. Some more progress is needed before we are at that stage,
Erwin

[KenB]

Very interesting. Is it co-authored with someone or is this your solo project (much work!)?

[Erwin Coumans]

Is it co-authored with someone or is this your solo project (much work!)?

There are several contributions planned from other authors. Not sure how much I can publically announce at this early stage, but several academics and game industry professionals are involved in either review or contributons. Nevertheless, it is much work indeed.
Thanks,
Erwin

[ngbinh]

Is it co-authored with someone or is this your solo project (much work!)?

There are several contributions planned from other authors. Not sure how much I can publically announce at this early stage, but several academics and game industry professionals are involved in either review or contributons. Nevertheless, it is much work indeed.
Thanks,
Erwin

Interesting! You've got an early customer!