Manju Hegde, former CEO of Ageia, then came to the stage to talk about the future of PhysX following Nvidia's recent acquisition of Ageia. Huang described GPU accelerated physics as the second killer application this year. "In my estimation, this will be the second killer app this year. The first one is video editing—we're going to speed that sucker up by 10 or 20 times—and the second will be physics."
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Hegde said that PhysX was the most pervasive and advanced physics API on the planet, claiming that it's featured in at least 140 titles across all platforms. He also revealed that the PhysX SDK had been completely ported over to CUDA, therefore enabling GPU accelerated physics, in just one month and he claimed that there has been an exponential increase in developer adoption because of >50m installed base of CUDA-ready GPUs.
Whichever way you look at it, physics is going to be an increasingly more important part of the future – we've seen some titles start to really use physics effectively in the past year or so, but we expect that to increase now that there is more horsepower available. Of course, we've not been the biggest fans of PhysX in the past—mainly because of the fact you needed additional hardware to enjoy the real benefits of Ageia's technology, which meant that the effects were usually limited to 'special' levels that nobody without a PhysX card played due to sub-par performance—but this is shaping up to be quite a smart acquisition by Nvidia.
There's still a question mark in my mind though, and that's the ubiquity of CUDA-based GPUs. The code can of course run on the CPU if there isn't a CUDA-ready GPU available in the system, but given the ubiquity of multi-core CPUs, it's impossible to say which way this battle will go. Let's forget about Intel for the moment, because I'm not sure AMD would be too happy about not having GPU accelerated physics in the future. Could we be returning to a situation where certain features of games (or even entire games) will be vendor-specific again like they were in the late 1990s? I really hope not.
