AGEIA is working hard on marketing its game physics accelerator PhysX and AGEIA’s work has made graphics circuit manufacturers ATI and NVIDIA react. The relationship to graphics cards is quite close and now yet another common nominator has appeared. AGEIA is namely investigating the possibility to bring several PhysX cards together in some sort of multi-PPU configuration, like SLI or Crossfire. This information comes from X-bit Labs which has dissected AGEIA’s latest PhysX driver and has found code that looks like the base for systems with multiple physics accelerators.
“Ageia’s future drivers should be able to “split” the scene into multiple three-dimensional “compartments” assigning a dedicated physics processing unit (PPU) for each.”
Whether AGEIA really has plans for this or not, the first priority is still to launch its PCI Express version of PhysX, but at the same time we’re eager to see what kind of performance boost this would lead to. Today the most important to AGEIA is to get the game development rolling so that today’s PhysX can really show what it’s worth.
