What is Ageia Physx?

Question

My brother recently bought me a new motherboard and there is this new program i notice in the control panel. It is ageia physx. what exactly is this? Is this some type of new graphic card? I already own a graphic card (ati x1300). Is ageia work side by side with ati or what? can anyone clarify me on this?

So, does Ageia work side by side with my ati graphic card, or is it a stand alone graphic card?

Answer 1

Here is a link check it out.

Answer 2

Ageia Physx Card

Answer 3

PhysX can refer either to a proprietary realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by AGEIA (formerly known as the NovodeX SDK) or their PPU expansion card designed to accelerate that SDK.

Middleware physics engines allow game developers to avoid writing their own code to handle the complex physics interactions possible in modern games. Sony has licensed the PhysX SDK for their PlayStation 3 video game console.



AGEIA, founded in 2002, is a fabless semiconductor company. AGEIA invented PhysX - a Physics Processing Unit chip capable of performing physics calculations much faster than general purpose CPUs; they also license out the PhysX SDK (formerly NovodeX SDK), a large physics middleware library for game production.

Ageia is noted as being the first company to develop hardware designed to offload calculation of video game physics from the CPU to a separate chip. Prior to this, solutions from ATI and Nvidia had not been planned nor announced. Soon after the Ageia implementation of their PhysX processor, Nvidia and ATI announced their own physics implementations.

Answer 4

Side by side, it is not a graphics card. It is meant to do physics in games, which is different from graphics. The game has to be written to take advantage of it for it to do anything.