According to this press release, nVidia will acquire Ageia Technologies. Yeap! The well known physics software and hardware vendor. In my mind this means that the future nVidia based accelerators will support physics acceleration, too. It will basically mean the death of the PhysX processor, since the GPU can do that easily with no extra cost.
Actually the PPU solution was never to work. I find it quite hard to believe people would ever buy physics acceleration cards. So now we can enjoy accelerated physics using the already installed parallel processor in our system. However the use of PhysX concerns me a bit. I would feel much more comfortable with an open standard/API for physics. Something like OpenGL for graphics. But these things will have to move this way eventually. Just consider PhysX as the Glide of accelerated physics…
