Over at Dell they have the M1730 available in configurations ranging from insanely expensive to 'sell a kidney' expensive. They feature SLI graphics, insane speeds, and of course, the newly minted Ageia M100 laptop Physx processor. These machines promise to strip the fillings out of your head with their incredible processing power, but don't expect battery life to be a selling feature: even though the Ageia chip sucks a miserly 10 watts the rest of the rig will drain your batteries faster than you can say 'lithium ion'.
While Dell has the exclusive over the next while several other vendors are sure to enter the fray depending on demand of the Dell unit. This definitely falls under the category of 'laptop envy', but this one is sure to please.
Over at Bit-Tech Joe Martin has a fairly indepth look at the future of Physx from a titles perspective taking some time to examine both Graw: 2 and Warmonger. He also gets a chance to chat with Michael Steele, VP of Marketing who addresses some of the recent commentary out of John Carmack. Have a read!
One of the most exciting new features in the AGEIA SDK is a feature called "soft bodies".. here's a video example of a few different uses for them. Thanks to ShortStuf7 on Youtube for making the video.
AGEIA has given us a sneak peak of their 'carwash' hardware fluids simulation application. PhysX owners, it's a 13MB download and great 'look what my PC can do' eye candy. Enjoy!
Fuad Abazovic at Theinquirer.net has written an interesting article about the use of multiple Physx cards in a machine which seems to be enabled in their most recent SDK. But will multiple Physx cards really give that much benefit?
Sorry I wasn't able to get this up earlier - but in cooperation with Dell and BFG there is a 'Digital Life' show special available online for anyone in the market for an Ageia card. The card is on for $166.74 here.
Over at Gamespot they have an interview with Michael Steele, VP of Marketing at Ageia about what direction he feels the gaming industry is heading and what physics can bring to the table, as well as throwing in some commentary about some of the competition.
Ageia was first to market with a compelling product with the introduction of the Physx card. Seeing an opportunity, NVidia and ATI have both shown off similar technologies, but they are taking a different approach. All three companies have competing technologies and innovations, and they are all competing for the largest piece of the physics pie in terms of titles that are coded to take advantage of their hardware. Ageia has the benefit of being first to market and also has significantly more horsepower from a hardware perspective. Does Ageia have the head start to make this work? The answer may lie with Microsoft.
Ageia, creators of the Physx PPU, have created a benchmark to gauge physics performance both with hardware and with software. The benchmark, RealityMark, is not yet available for download but I was able to score this video showing the performance of hardware acceleration vs. software. Some interesting things to note - in the software clip you will see that the cloth simulation is right out the door - this is likely due to the fact it is crawling along at about 2 frames per second.
