AGEIA Technologies happily reports today that they have achieved record quarterly sales for Q3 of this year. This news comes after considerable exposure for the company at the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany two weeks ago. At the event, the company announced a new, mobile application of its PhysX technology. The new chip, dubbed the PhysX 100M, is optimized for the mobile computing world by way of its low power consumption and miniscule thermal design, dissipating just 10W of heat under full gameplay conditions. This chip has already been adopted by Dell and will come as standard equipment in an upcoming XPS series notebook, presumably the highly-anticipated M1730. AGEIA has publically stated that other major notebook manufacturers have also expressed interest in the new technology.

In addition to their advancements on the mobile front, the original PhysX PPU is gaining industry acceptance in the desktop market as well. HP’s recently announced Blackbird 002 gaming desktop, the first major release in the gaming realm from the company after their acquisition of long-time system integrator aficionados Voodoo PC, is “optimized” for PhysX. In addition to domestic sales of the PhysX PPU, the two leading PC manufacturers in Europe have also adopted the technology. Medion and Acer, the EU’s equivalent of Dell and HP, are increasing the use of PhysX PPU’s in their high-end systems.

Lastly on the AGEIA front comes unofficial news of some new PhysX hardware. Pictures of the new hardware, which appeared recently on various websites depict the card in a PCI-e x8/x16 form factor. We can confirm that the new hardware will indeed be native to the PCI-Express bus, but details of the speed and performance of the card have understandably been withheld. Also interesting to note is the presence of a SLI-like bridge socket on the top of the prototype cards. We believe this to be the vehicle for multi-PPU technology – an idea which seems to have more promise as a general purpose, massively parallel supercomputer than anything gaming-related for the time being.

On the subject of general purpose processors, the promised GPU physics of last year have yet to materialize in any sort of palpable form. NVIDIA’s Havok FX and AMD’s triple CrossFire physics solutions are attractive on paper, but we have yet to see either in action. For more information on GPGPU computing and its potential application for hardware physics acceleration, please refer to our previous article, GPGPU Discussion.

How likely are you to buy a PhysX card by the end of the year?

UT3... How can I resist?

Very Likely

Somewhat Likely

Not Likely

I need to see the game myself first