More Support for AGEIA PhysX
Good afternoon HH fans. The news is coming in at a steady clip today, and I just came across an interesting tid-bit by way of AGEIA that I didn't want to let sit. Today, the fledgling company announced that Futuremark, the makers of the well-known 3DMark and PCMark line of benchmarks, has licensed the PhysX SDK. Here's a snip from the official announcement...
Futuremark Licenses AGEIA PhysX SDK for Inclusion in Industry-Leading Benchmarks
Upcoming Futuremark benchmarks will provide first objective measurement of the extreme physics acceleration in multithreaded, multi-core systems
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – September 29, 2005 – AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc., the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games, today announced that Futuremark has signed an agreement to license the AGEIA PhysX™ SDK for use in future products. The inclusion of AGEIA PhysX technology will add comprehensive physics benchmarking to Futuremark's traditional battery of performance tests for 3D graphics, CPUs, memory and other component and system parameters.
Among other benefits, the use of AGEIA PhysX technology in Futuremark's high profile client demos and benchmarks will provide an objective measurement of the tremendous improvements in physics performance enabled by the AGEIA PhysX processor. Upcoming Futuremark benchmarks also will test the performance of the AGEIA software physics engine on various hardware configurations in real-life game scenarios. As the world's only multithreaded API for physics, the AGEIA PhysX SDK should excel in exploiting multi-core CPU architectures, which will be the standard in next-generation processors. In addition to raw performance, the multithreaded AGEIA PhysX SDK should also provide consistent scalability, maintaining high performance even with large numbers of objects in a scene. Read More...
Whether or not AGEIA's add-in PhysX processor gains wide acceptance amongst the enthusiast community has been a matter of great debate here at HotHardware, and within the rest of the industry. One side argues that there is only so much room for dedicated processors in the PC, and points to the add-in sound card market as an example. The other side claims the benefit of dedicated physics processing could bring a while new level of realism to PC gaming, and contends that enthusiasts will want to enjoy these benefits, provided an add-in PhysX board isn't prohibitively expensive...
What do you all think? We want to know. Voice your opinion in our poll at the upper-right of the page.
