Parks Associates Blog

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

NVIDIA Buys Ageia

This will definitely affect both console and PC gaming. A dedicated Physics processing unit (PPU) delivers much better experiences for end gamers. Games using Physics SDKs from Ageia and Havoc do a good job in improving the gaming experience, but if the gamer’s computer has a dedicated PPU, the experience is even better. For power gamers who always want the latest and greatest, they will be willing to spend the extra money to buy PPU, similar to what happened in the early days of dedicated GPUs.

PPU not only makes the gaming experience more realistic since it delivers real-time physics, it also can potentially extend the value/life of a game since each time gamers will see different consequences to their actions. This type of ever-changing gameplay has been termed ‘emergent gameplay’ to illustrate the ability of a game to provide new experiences beyond the surface gameplay concepts. These concepts have been trickling down from the core PC and console games such as Half-Life 2 to more mainstream casual games as seen in recent titles The Tower of Goo, Gish, and Crayon Physics.

Nvidia has been a leader in GPU and although it has branched out into other areas, its root is always in gaming.Buying Ageia makes a lot of sense to us. As a matter of fact, a couple of years ago, Parks Associates made the recommendation to several large semiconductor companies that they should pay close attention to Ageia. Nvidia has the marketing muscle and operational scale to bring down the cost and make PPUs more mainstream.

1 Comments:

Blogger James Kuai said...

Any other Physics companies left to be bought by ATI? They just look like such nice complementers to GPU companies or even chipset vendors such as Intel.

10:39 AM  

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