First PhysX PPU cards available...

[savage]

AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc., the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games, today announced the availability of its PhysX™ processor, the first physics processing unit (PPU) designed to power pervasive real-time physics in PC gaming. With immediate availability from the world’s leading gaming system and personal computer manufacturers Alienware, Dell, and Falcon Northwest, the AGEIA PhysX Accelerator brings true physics interaction on a massive scale to serious gamers for the first time.
...
AGEIA PhysX Accelerator add-in boards from leading board manufacturers ASUS and BFG will be available in wide distribution in May of this year.

The official press release can be read @ http://ageia.vnewscenter.com/press.jsp?id=1143040307847

[savage]

There's some examples of PhysX in action from their Real-Time footage page which can be found @
http://physx.ageia.com/footage.html

I was impressed with the HD game play footage of CellFactor ( NOTE : 116MB download )

Has anyone had the chance to play with the API yet? Sly??

[Sly]

Haven't seen hide nor hair of the API yet. I don't know how much use it will be for console development though, since we don't release games on PC any more. Our last PC game was Extremely Goofy Skateboarding back in 2001.

I have not heard of anyone supporting the card, but apparently there are several games in development that will support it. But those games will also have to supply a CPU-only physics path because not many people will have the card initially.

[Clootie]

As I understand that API is just the same Novodex engine AGEIA bought last year. And this engine is actually used (in software form) by a number of games on consoles.

[savage]

I thought I read recently that Sony were going to ship the PhysX api as part of the PS3 devkit. Maybe someone is working on some sort of PS3 addon that the games can use. Then in PS3 v2.0 it will be inside the console.

Anyone want to start a company that offers a unified AI card .