Ageia Slashes PhysX Accelerator Pricing to $99

[malware]

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.

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[sneekypeet]

No offense but they have been on Fleabay at $100 for a while now ....the ones Ive watched still never even got a bid at that price, and some of these were BNIB. Dont really think this is going to help the cause much!!!

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.....http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=Ageia&category0=

 

[Kreij]

I honestly think that most people are happy with the level of physics in their games without a PPU. It's not a bad idea, just not worth paying a premium for something that gets you very little.

Maybe if they were $9.99 at Wallymart I might give it some thought....

 

[AddSub]

Maybe if they were $9.99 at Wallymart I might give it some thought....

Yeah, pretty much. $10-$15 is the max amount I can see myself paying for this useless trinket.

 

[erocker]

If I become a UT3 fanatic, I might get one for mods and such.

 

[surfsk8snow.jah]

I'd go for like $40-$50... more games are indeed supporting it...

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.

 

[happita]

The price for these things have come down quite a bit. But I think there would've been better ways to gain popularity, like more support from developers, better marketing, etc.
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

 

[insider]

Old technology well past it's sell by date, you guys talk like it's cutting edge or something, lol

 

[Nothgrin]

with programmers threading more and more games these days the same calculations can be done on seperate cores at a faster speed since most dual/quad cores share some sort of cache this allows calculations inside the chip to maintain low cache miss rates when the cache is being hit by the cpu... thus they need to make a major improvement on the physx card to be viable. The only thing thats making them sell is they are dedicated to physics and their SDK allows programmers to easily implement physics into their games without the loss in FPS. (before dual core days). If we look at the old days they used to use a math co-processor seperate from the CPU. If Ageia is able to punch out an MB with their physX embedded it will soon become standardized. This would allow the extra threaded core to be open for something else AND the physx chip would have less bottlenecks bypassing the pci bus. There would of course also need to be on motherboard ram for the physx chip or use some type of cache system thats shared with the cpu.

 

[PVTCaboose1337]

Finally they slash the prices... I am happy now!

 

[lemonadesoda]

But the original price WASNT $150! Its just the current price, after 18 months worth of non-sales.

Ageia deserve to die, as a case study for MBA schools.

 

[Ketxxx]

I'd still think twice if the things were £40, their just not worth it and time and again tests done have shown the PPU reducing framerate. The PPU needs re-engineering. It needs to totally offload physics calculations from the graphics card and \ or CPU directly on to the PPU, instead of simply enabling more debris.

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

id pay 20 dollars for one.

 

[zekrahminator]

I can understand why Ageia charged $300 at launch, and why they're selling for $100. They could be $5 or $500, I simply don't want one. My A64 renders physics just fine, thanks .

 

[Ketxxx]

Ditto. My C2D runs the PhysX software flawlessly, very smooth. I still stand by the PPU is a good idea though, IF its re-engineered to offload all physics calculations directly to the PPU, not simply enable the ability for more debris.

 

[WarEagleAU]

Excellent idea Surfsk8snow. Mayhaps AMD will be doing this if they buy them out.

 

[a_ump]

im a gamer personally and i've seen this card at newegg and noticed its the only one of its kind so i never paid much attention but would adding this card help fps enough to make it worth 100 bucks???

 

[Wile E]

im a gamer personally and i've seen this card at newegg and noticed its the only one of its kind so i never paid much attention but would adding this card help fps enough to make it worth 100 bucks???

It doesn't help fps at all, quite the opposite, actually. It just enables more physics effects, which in turn, the gpu must render.

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.

 

[-2kill-]

There is some upandocming projects that a dedicated phsyics unit would be absolutely sweet for, fully destroyable levels would own. Starting with a huge city block and then ending with a pile of rubble who doesn't want to destroy a city. But then you go and look at the stuff it supports now such as UT3 and errgghh.

 

[Nothgrin]

It doesn't help fps at all, quite the opposite, actually. It just enables more physics effects, which in turn, the gpu must render.

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.

With the prices down like this if they only lowered their Developer prices accordingly im sure Ageia PhysX would be used in many games. This is because users of their SDK only need to know how to use their SDK they dont need to know the exact math behind it. Thus saving alot of time making sure physics calculations are right and developing code that has to be rewritten if the math was calclated incorrect in the first place.

 

[zekrahminator]

There is some upandocming projects that a dedicated phsyics unit would be absolutely sweet for, fully destroyable levels would own. Starting with a huge city block and then ending with a pile of rubble who doesn't want to destroy a city. But then you go and look at the stuff it supports now such as UT3 and errgghh.

You can do that in Crysis, mainly because the "cities" are tiny shacks .

 

[bim27142]

will this be of help to my Opteron 165 rig?

 

[a_ump]

i like eye candy as well but with games like crysis i dout i need something that will make my gpu work harder than it already is, blacksite area 51 was i thk is also completely destructible but i heard it got a bad rating on ign so i didn't buy, though the demo was sweet!!

 

[effmaster]

i like eye candy as well but with games like crysis i dout i need something that will make my gpu work harder than it already is, blacksite area 51 was i thk is also completely destructible but i heard it got a bad rating on ign so i didn't buy, though the demo was sweet!!

Its only a mediocre game that probably deserved at least another half years worth of development time according to Game Informer Magazine.

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

 

[KennyT772]

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

Ever heard of a period?

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.