Ageia
Fabless semiconductor company
Ageia, founded in 2002, was a fabless semiconductor company. In 2004, Ageia acquired NovodeX, the company who created PhysX, a Physics Processing Unit chip capable of performing game physics calculations much faster than general purpose CPUs; it also licensed out the PhysX SDK (formerly NovodeX SDK), a large physics middleware library for game production.
Ageia was noted as being the first company to develop hardware designed to offload calculation of video game physics from the CPU to a separate chip, commercializing it in the form of the Ageia PhysX, a discrete PCI card. Soon after the Ageia implementation of its PhysX processor, ATI and Nvidia announced their own physics implementations.
On September 1, 2005, Ageia acquired Meqon from Meqon Research AB, a physics development company based in Sweden. Known for its forward-looking features and multi-platform support, Meqon earned international acclaim for its physics technology incorporated in 3D Realms’ Duke Nukem Forever and Saber Interactive's TimeShift.
On February 4, 2008, Nvidia announced that it would acquire Ageia. On February 13, 2008, the merger was finalized.
The PhysX engine is now known as Nvidia PhysX, and has been adapted to be run on Nvidia's GPUs.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Ageia”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Ageia logo.png by Ageia, Public domain
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