Wednesday, November 21st 2007
Ageia Slashes PhysX Accelerator Pricing to $99
AGEIA is planning to gain more popularity this weekend, by offering new low prices for its dedicated physics processing unit (PPU). This holiday season, you will be able to get a PCI PhysX card with 128MB GDDR3 onboard memory for just $99. The offer, which will run throughout the holiday shopping season will see major online shops like Newegg and TigerDirect sell the card at $99, significantly lower than the original $150+ price tag.
Source:
TechConnect Magazine
25 Comments on Ageia Slashes PhysX Accelerator Pricing to $99
Altho as I make this statement and recheck the bay....seems as if this may help their cause a bit more than as of last month.....search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=Ageia&category0=
Maybe if they were $9.99 at Wallymart I might give it some thought....
What Ageia REALLY needs to do is work out a deal with motherboard manufacturers, and/or graphics card manufacturers, and just have the chips come embedded on those PCBs... this is far greater a business deal for Ageia, and would get their technology out there so much more.
We'd start seeing "EVGA 8800GT 768MB w/ Ageia PHYSX" or "EVGA 680i SLI w/ Ageia PHYSX"... I would pay an extra $40-$50 for my mobo or GPU if it came with Physx engine on it"
They wouldn't have to produce their own entirely separate card, thus taking out those production costs. Just sell the chips.
But all in all from the debut price I think was around $280ish? I think that this is a good deal, although I'll never sink that low to buy such a thing :p
Ageia deserve to die, as a case study for MBA schools.
That said, I'd get one if more games were supported. Screw ultra high fps, I like eye-candy. As long as it's playable, I'm happy.
Now about this PPU its impossible no matter how you look at it to have the PPU not lose you any framerates at all it does help offfload some of the Physics processing that would have been used on the primary Graphics card but it still needs to have SOME commands given to it by the Graphics card so your getting alot more eye candy with the graphics card than you would with out the PPU because if you had the Graphics card perform the same Physics as it would with the PPU then you would yield even less Frames than with the PPU so look at it that way and your actually gaining Frames per second
Simply as he said, there are no games to my knowledge that offload physics to the card. The physics they speak of are either disabled without the card, or enabled with.
This is truly a technology that needs to be integrated into the motherboard.