ageia vs. ati and nvidia
 

do you think that ageia will be able to hold up against the bigger name corps if they released a physics chip?

I'm just going to assume you posted this in General Game Music Discussion by mistake. I'll move it to the Hardware forum now.

How about some info?

ati's solution requires another videocard to do the processing - one gpu won't render graphics and process physics at the same time. all i can think of is how weak that is-- "buy a graphics card to do physics!" so i think that ageia can win out in the future - but right now, there are a few problems with it.

1) games enable way too many physics when you have an ageia in there-- that is why games suck with them.

2) ageia's cards are apparently running from the PCI bus! more bandwidth would be a very good thing.... even if the processor on it is blazingly fast it probably can't get the data to the cpu fast enough.

now a reason or two for them:

1) ageia has the possibility of similar performance for less money - video cards are pretty expensive (though the x1600 is not too bad at all).

2) ageia is focused on physics, while ati and nvidia have to split their focus between graphics and physics.

Yes.

Red9, please bring forth some information or discussion to the thread. It's a standard we uphold for all newly created threads in the general area of the forums.

ok, so from what i understand, the ageia physx chip is a chip that takes the pressure off the cpu for ai, and thus, physics. it increases the number of pixels on the screen without slowing down the computer. also, i read that you wont need to buy a new one when it gets upgraded; you get new drivers off the net. the software is being used in ps3's, and a lot of big name titles have picked it up, like ut2007. thats about it.

Meh, I like my all-purpose Graphics Card. I'd rather not have to mess with another PhysX chip. They seem to be pretty expensive too since they aren't video cards, you'll need a video card anyway.

I don't see how it puts more pixels on the screen. Doesn't it just calculate a lot of physics aspects of games? Does it actually boast additional pixel pipelines? Forgive me, but I'm not too familiar on how a PhysX chip works.

Yea, right.