Ageia PhysX Processor Unit Preview

Physics hardware manufacturer Ageia was on hand at E3 to give us a progress update on the new PhysX processing unit that it announced a couple of months ago at the Game Developers Conference. Ageia showed working hardware, and we had the opportunity see several tech demonstrations as well as a couple of game demos. You can download a ZIP file with all of the Ageia movies here.

Agiea president and COO Curtis Davis expects that there will be five to 15 major PC titles ready in time for launch that "will meet the wow factor and show something never seen before." At E3 this week, Ageia has announced that several games will be using the Ageia's NovodeX physics engine in upcoming games including Cryptic Studios' City of Villains. Only games that use the NovodeX software will be able to benefit from physics acceleration on the PhysX chip.

The PhysX chip will be the first hardware-based physics processing unit (PPU) released for the PC platform. Physics-accelerated games will be able to offload physics calculations from the CPU to the PPU much like how 3D-accelerated games process graphics on a video card. The extra physics processing power will let developers create game environments with a massive number of physical objects that would cause normal CPUs to grind to a halt. This will allow games to use effects like fluid dynamics or cloth simulation and to create gameworlds where a player can interact with tens of thousands of objects instead of only 20 or 30.

Ageia will begin test production in June and expects to hit volume production in September. Ageia is a fabless semiconductor company similar to graphics manufacturer Nvidia. That means Ageia will use a foundry to produce the chips and then sell the finished chips to board partners that will create and market the PhysX add-in cards to consumers and system builders. Motherboard manufacturer Asus and another "large OEM" will be the first to ship PhysX-based PPU cards.

While the final board specs will be decided by the manufacturer, the Ageia reference board design will include 128MB of GDDR3 memory. Initial boards will be PCI-compatible, but PCI Express versions will follow afterward. Retail boards should appear in the October time frame and should sell in the high-$200 range.