In an interview with Boot Daily, id Software tech guru John Carmack stated that he doesn’t really believe in PPUs (physics processing units). Shoving another microprocessor into a PC that’ll just handle physics may sound good on paper, but as of late, it’s having trouble treading water.
Carmack said, "I am not a believer in dedicated PPUs. Multiple CPU cores will be much more useful in general, but when GPUs finally get reasonably fine grained context switching and scheduling, some tasks will work well there."
Carmack’s words may have targeted AGEIA’s PhysX processor. For a little over a year and a half, the PhysX hasn’t really been used for many PCs, let alone much game support. Also AGEIA directly competes with another physics powerhouse company — Havok. Havok has been really popular as of late and has been used in over 150 games.
Even though id Software may not choose to support PhysX chips, another big gunner is: Epic Games and their Unreal Engine 3. Considering that the Unreal Engine 3 is a pretty hot commodity as of late, then AGEIA can definitely be on the up-swing.
