Well that was fast -- just nine days after announcing plans to acquire PhysX maker Ageia, NVIDIA said today that the deal is done. Still no word on when we might see NVIDIA cards with Ageia tech in them, but we'll let these two enjoy their first Valentine's day as a happy couple merged corporate entity before we start asking the hard questions.

[Thanks, Ryan]

After months of rumors and speculation, NVIDIA announced today that it's acquiring Ageia and its PhysX tech. There's no word on how much coin NVIDIA is dropping on the deal, but the company says the move makes sense, given the similarities in GPU and PPU designs and the trend towards massively parallel coprocessing units like NVIDIA's CUDA cards. Of course, given the war of words between game devs and hardware manufacturers over the value of PPU units, it'll be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this deal -- come on, John Carmack, we know you've got a statement ready.

[Via FPS Labs; Thanks, Chuck]

We wouldn't go so as far to say that developers in the dedicated PPU world are "firing back" over John Carmack's statement last week that he is "not a believer in dedicated PPUs," but we would at least say that they're offering alternative opinions. In a recent Bit-tech article, Ageia's Dan Forster tackles concerns over the need for PPUs, and (in)directly addresses Carmack's statement that "multiple CPU cores will be much more useful in general," by suggesting that no matter how many cores are involved, there are timing issues between them when being distributed to separate tasks. Forster claims "At the moment, there's not a single game that supports multi-threading even at a basic level..." Leaving some of us to wonder just what Carmack is on about -- but do you really want to question the man who created Doom? Didn't think so.

There's been plenty of hubbub surrounding the release of Ageia's dedicated PhysX "PPU" board, with Epic Games pledging extensive "Unreal Tournament 2007" support and around 20 titles in the works. Unfortunately, the launch support is pretty weak, and since the whole point of the tech is the gaming joy that it enables, there doesn't seem much point to get a card at this point. Just "Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter" is available with PhysX at launch, and the effects that are turned on in the game with the PhysX card enabled are not only not fully realized, but cause a decent hit to frame rates. Games built from the ground up to use the PhysX card, such as the forthcoming "Cell Factor" which claims to be the the first title to require the card, look quite good and frankly do things with physics that just aren't possible with the traditional CPU / GPU combo. With that said, major titles built in such a way around the PhysX hardware will be few and far between for a while, giving few reasons to spring for the $300 card until the kinks are worked out and the special effects it enables are more than tacked on -- if flashy -- extras. Anywho, for the curious here are a few reviews we found, anyone else got one? Leave it in comments and we'll tack it on.

Read - Hexus.net
Read - AnandTech
Read - Pc Perspective