Ageia has big plans for PhysX in '07
We met with Ageia at the show to go over plans for its PhysX accelerator and if there’s a future for the technology given the rocky start.
Ageia had no issues admitting that the PhysX launch wasn’t very good, so it is committed to fixing problems and doing whatever it can do correct the negative image of the first physics accelerator in 2007.
According to Ageia, 2007 will be a year of really ramping up the quality and quantity of games that implement PhysX support. Ageia hopes to achieve better overall quality through three major steps that are currently being implemented:
1) All PhysX titles that are released must go through some sort of an approval process before they can ship. This gives Ageia some input into the game development process and will hopefully mean that Ageia can pull support if a game doesn’t meet its standards. On the flip side, it also means that if mediocre PhysX implementations make it into games that Ageia will no longer be able to simply blame the developer; in the future, Ageia will be just as responsible as the developer.
2) Performance of a game with PhysX enabled must not be lower than with it disabled - you should no longer have the problem of better physics but lower performance. This is a big step forward for Ageia, as it is difficult to justify spending money on getting better physics if you end up reducing overall game performance as a trade off.
3) PhysX enabled titles must offer some sort of significant improvement with hardware acceleration enabled. Once again this is a sort of certification or stamp of approval by Ageia that the use of PhysX hardware will actually do more for your gameplay than make a nice tech demo.
Ageia remained fairly vague in how strictly it plans to enforce these requirements, but now it must share the responsibility if PhysX continues to be a failure by the end of 2007. According to Ageia, there will be three AAA game titles released before the end of 2007 that will make substantial use of its PhysX card, above and beyond anything that has been done to date.
Keep in mind that the PhysX core is still built on a 130nm process, so there’s room to reduce cost considerably. Ageia views the current PhysX implementation as a high end offering and plans on introducing lower cost variants to target other markets.
We left the Ageia meeting with a fairly strong statement from the company; by the end of 2007 Ageia expects the question of whether or not a PhysX card does anything to go away completely thanks to much better implementations in games and much better title availability.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrAp5utnZOde6S7zGiqoaenZH9ygY9oaG4%3D