AGEIA Announced the World’s First PhysX Processor for Notebooks

AGEIA Technologies today announced AGEIA PhysX 100M, the world’s first PhysX processor aimed at gaming notebooks.

“AGEIA PhysX Mobile Technology features incredibly low power and thermal design with power dissipation of nearly 10W under gameplay conditions. It also includes active power management to throttle down the clock in high heat system conditions and reduce the clock when not active. This new technology provides optimized PhysX processing resources to deliver the same peak PhysX processing throughput as the original AGEIA PhysX processor for desktop PCs,” according to the press release.

The gaming notebooks powered by PhysX Mobile Technology are expected to hit the market very soon, AGEIA says.

The AGEIA PhysX processors are specialized hardware accelerators “dedicated solely to delivering rich immersive physical gaming environments” with features such as explosions that cause dust and collateral debris, the more realistic motion and interaction, or dense smoke and fog that billow around objects in motion, for example.

However, AGEIA PhysX chips haven’t became popular among desktop PC gamers yet. In addition, there is a lack of game titles currently supporting PhysX.

“Primarily, PhysX cards from BFG Tech and Asus cost in the area of $140 through resellers. From the beginning, adding in an additional card for physics hasn’t really sparked interest in gamers due to the lack of titles. In other words, gamers building new systems don’t exactly see dropping more dough on at PPU as a necessity. But (upcoming) Unreal Tournament 3 could provide the push AGEIA needs, if the PPU turns out to be a must-have item and UT3 is a must-have game,” Ars Technica reports.

Source

[…] In addition, we expect the M1730 to include the recently announced Core 2 Extreme X7900 CPU, while, according to reports, Dell might also provide the GeForce 8800M graphics option. Some reports say Dell’s upcoming gaming notebook will include the AGEIA PhysX 100M module, “dedicated solely to delivering rich immersive physical gaming environments”. […]