We knew it was coming, and now it appears that NVIDIA’s acquisition of PhysX maker Ageia is about to pay off. NVIDIA has told analysts that that the conversion of Ageia’s physics application interface to CUDA is nearly complete—so if you are running GeForce 8000+ you will soon be able to enjoy the benefits of a physics accelerator via a simple software download.
Dell wanted to bring its gaming platform down from the US$2000 and up arena, and into something average gamers can go and buy, so it’s rolling out the previously teased XPS 630.
AU: Just heard from Dell in Australia, and we’re looking at a staring price of $2,299 down here. It launches on Feb 29 as well, so only two more sleeps if you can’t wait to get your hands on this machine.
We suspected this, but now it’s clear that NVIDIA’s end game when it picked up PhysX-maker AGEIA was to integrate physics processors into graphics cards. Right now, they’re porting the PhysX engine over to run on GeForce 8s, and it’ll be a simple software download, bringing some additional physics-crunching juice to current cards. The next step is a GPU with an onboard specialised physics processor.
The standalone physics chip that Ageia released two years ago is making its way into laptops. Don’t expect to use the PhysX 100M mobile processors in tiny notebooks though, these are designed for big desktop replacement mofos, and should ship with a Dell machine first before it hits other “laptops”. No info on how much added cost this will be, the actual use of PhysX chips is questionable since not all that many games support it for more than a little eye candy. [Extreme Tech] More »
