Ageia, the not-so-successful company that makes physics processors for PCs will be acquired by Nvidia. The announcement came on monday, along with this press release.
AMD was considering purchasing Ageia last November but since they were still dealing with the ATI acquisition the decided that it wasn’t the time to do so.
Both Nvidia and ATI have looked into doing physics processing on the GPU but it never really got anywhere. This acquisition of Ageia however could bring in a new wave of graphics cards with GPUs and physics processing units on a single PCB.
I’m not really sure when we will see this acquisition really start to change things in the industry. Currently there are very few computers with physics processors and I’m not really sure if game developers are really clamoring for people to purchase such products.
Nvidia could be doing this to push the industry forward and if, at some time in the future many more computers supported dedicated physics processing we would see developers start to really use them, but for now I think everyone will do just fine with a mid-range to high end graphics card and a good CPU, a physics processor would be nice, but until you can use it, I think you’d just be better off spending the extra money on other components.