- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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Ageia releases free UT3 content, slashes Physx prices
THE TIME HAS TICKED away and, for Physx firm Ageia, it may be running out. Its Physx card will either start to thrive with Unreal Tournament 3, and games built under UE3 engine licences, or it's back to the drawing board.
The company has just released an UT3 Mod-Kit and two UT3 levels: Tornado and Lighthouse. We played the Tornado level at the Games Convention in Leipzig, and we were blown away.
The firm has also slashed the price of its Physx card to 99USD (or Euro), which now puts it in the affordable class (250USD? No way, I'd rather have 3870 or 8800GT).
Personally, I am a strong believer that we need real-world physics in games, and this just might be the next step in getting games designed with physics in mind. It does not need to be Ageia's one (even though the choice is rather limited), but we need physics. If you're wondering whether I would spend 100 USD on a Physx card to play these two levels in UT3, I would.
I still find it bizarre that the company brought a PCI part to the market, but $99 is something we would consider.
The PCIe product had latency problems with some motherboards which are PCIe 1.x compliant only on paper (the majority of first-gen PCIe chipsets), but the way you sort that one out is to put a warning on the box as to which motherboards the product will work with, and that's that. Of course, Ageia tried to play it smart, and ended up being a marginal part.
Time will tell whether Ageia learned from that mistake. But seeing their next-gen part featuring PCIe x4 slots, we wonder what is really going on there. ยต
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The price drop, and the fact that now Havok FX on GPU's is out of the loop may very well be the lifeline Aegia needs.

I must say, I did wonder why they didn't release a PCIe part; i think they need to do that as soon as possible. PCI bandwidth is OK for sound cards and 100Mbit NIC's but nothing more.

Well, I'd hate to see them die out. I think they have a good product and for 99 US I'm seriously contemplating picking one up myself. It's almost too good to resist.
The ppu jsut won't sell. This is what they should be doing.

get a pcie part (they are doing this i know), speak to the killer nic people, and integrate a cut down version of that as well.

Add in a fancy single slot cooler, that costs little but actually looks good (maybe to like the sound card for the p35 ROG asus boards?)

get a decent software bundle. They can target mmo's, most of which offer free 1 month trials anyway, so negotiate a 2 month free trial with as many as possible, and stick one decent game in there.

If possible, get the ppu to do something else as well, much like killer nic does, or can they get the ppu to do this, and bypass them altogether!


By the time that pricedrop reaches my area (that is to say the 2 shops in the country that sell ageia cards) ageia will already be bankrupt.
Unless the arabs buy into ageia too of course.
They will open up PhysX because they can't make fast enough hardware or sell it cheaply enough.

Look for PhysX running on Green Team and Green Team in 2008.
Well I now know what I'm getting for christmas...

A quad core Intel, a blazingly fast seagete 1TB hard drive, A radeon HD 3800 AND...

Ageia Physx! for that price & for that kind of game effects, it's well worth it.



P.S.

I wish I was buying an AMD spider platform with Phenom...BUT...well thats a long story...
ARM license chip cores to other manufacturers for integration into devices. ARM don't make chips themselves, but damned-near every mobile phone out there has an ARM core.

Why don't Ageia do something similar? They could design cores for integration with GPUs, allowing graphics card manufacturers to include built-in, proper physics instead of the less useful GPGPU faux-physics touted by DAAMIT and NVidia. 

Later iterations might allow integration of the core into CPUs. (Intel's purchase of Havok suggests that they're already thinking along these lines. I suggest AMD gets their wallet out.)

The price is better than before, yes, but I still wouldn't spend 100 euros for 2 UT3 levels. I think too that the physics are important and cool, but it would be better if CPU or GPU could handle them. I don't really like the idea of having to get another part for something like this, especially when you're not sure if it's going to stay or if it's just one of those things that come and go.
We don't need physx we don't want phisx. 
We want our multi core GPUs and CPUs to be used.
Now they bring in this abomination ...
Not because it increases performance but because Ageia payed the right amount of money to game developers.
Can you smell the corporate stink?..
the real reason behind the price drop -
http://gigahertz.byethost18.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=81&Itemid=54
Honestly if the price drop and UT3 support isn't good enough for you folk then what is? It feels like every time one of your requirements are met you set the bar higher. The PPU is now $100, the price many said they would consider. The game support list has grown and now UT3 Ageia/user created maps/mods have been added, people can literally create whatever they want with it now.

Even the people who made Crysis have admitted they will support the technology when the install base is up.

What more could you possibly want before you give a company of Ageia's size a break? Because while you are giving Ageia a hard time; GPU physics has been put on pause by Intel and CPU companies are struggling to fully utilise just two cores properly, not even Valve could get their head around it for the promised particle physics in HL2 EP2.

If you are not going to adopt at least give them a break and stop declaring them dead every month for the past two years.