Physics Processing Chip announced

At the GDC a Silicon Valley company called AGEIA Technologies is introducing PhysX, a dedicated PPU. They claim Star Trek's holodeck as inspiration for this piece of silicon accelerating video game physics simulation calculations: collision detection, rigid- and soft-body dynamics, fluid dynamics, and particle systems.

This is a fascinating idea that has been bandied about earlier, but AGEIA seems to be very serious about it and they do have some backing from the industry. The PhysX processor will accelerate physics for any game using the company's NovodeX Physics SDK, which is also designed to take advantage of multiprocessing systems. Epic Games' Tim Sweeney appears convinced and Ubisoft has agreed to use the technology.

The chips will be produced by TSMC and the plan is to market them on PCI Express and PCI cards to consumers through third-party board partners. They predictably make a big deal about the potential of PPUs being similar to that of GPUs, and while I wish them good luck I can't see consumers adopting something like this unless AGEIA manage to get their PPUs on popular graphics cards or motherboards.

9 March, 2005