I don't see this paning out. Yes the PhysX engine is a great idea... 5 years ago. With the advent of Quad-Core processors this card becomes obsolete - before it made it into action. Look at the demo of Alan Wake. You see this realistic world which uses 2 cores for physics simulations. Hmmmm, 2 Core cores dedicated to physics, with a bandwidth measured in Gbps, and a standard instruction set, or one proprietary processor with a bandwidth measured in Mbps, using a seperate command set. It is much easier for developers to write code for an x86 processor than another one, and while the PhysX engine may be free, if the developers can now just put a prerequisite of four cores on the box, rather than require people to buy a PCI card that may only ever be used for that one game... the developers are oing to pick the one that is more likely for people to use.
All in all, if this was 5 years ago, Ageia would have their cards in all gamers computers, and so the developers would continue to use that engine for a while, but it wasn't there then, and so it's not going to get there now. Sorry Ageia, your idea was great, but it's no longer practical.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I don't see this paning out. Yes the PhysX engine is a great idea... 5 years ago. With the advent of Quad-Core processors this card becomes obsolete - before it made it into action. Look at the demo of Alan Wake. You see this realistic world which uses 2 cores for physics simulations. Hmmmm, 2 Core cores dedicated to physics, with a bandwidth measured in Gbps, and a standard instruction set, or one proprietary processor with a bandwidth measured in Mbps, using a seperate command set. It is much easier for developers to write code for an x86 processor than another one, and while the PhysX engine may be free, if the developers can now just put a prerequisite of four cores on the box, rather than require people to buy a PCI card that may only ever be used for that one game... the developers are oing to pick the one that is more likely for people to use.
All in all, if this was 5 years ago, Ageia would have their cards in all gamers computers, and so the developers would continue to use that engine for a while, but it wasn't there then, and so it's not going to get there now. Sorry Ageia, your idea was great, but it's no longer practical.
R.I.P. Ageia.