Conclusion

Since there were almost no games supporting physics co-processor when we worked on this article, we believe it would be fair to call it AGEIA PhysX technology preview. It would be a mistake to make any final conclusions about the efficiency of the new technology judging only by the results of one single game and a few demos. However, there are a few things that we feel quite confident saying.

Market Prospective

First of all, it is very clear that AGEIA’s success depends solely on the game developers’ support. If the support is relatively weak or there is none, this theoretically promising solution may follow in the footsteps of Nvidia NV1. I allowed myself this comparison because, in fact, there is no unified standard for creating physical effects. There are a few engines that compete for the prestigious title of the standard setter: AGEIA, Havok 4, Havok FX and later there will be another one – DirectX Physics from Microsoft.

The latter two allow using graphics processors supporting FP32 to calculate the physics model. Since they are very widely spread in the today’s market already, they have better chances to become more universal solutions than AGEIA engine that requires special hardware, which is not so widely available in the market yet.

Note that multi-core processors are also getting more and more popular, so the game developers may go with Havok 4 engine for physical effects, because this engine is optimized for multi-core processors, including Cell of PlayStation 3.

AGEIA needs at least one really well-known and popular game to popularize its approach to realistic gaming physics. Right now there is no game like that, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is definitely not the one. Although there is one candidate we all are waiting for: the multi-player Unreal Tournament 2007 shooter.