Although Nvidia purchased physics hardware manufacturer Ageia Technologies, it may not discontinue the dedicated solutions the latter used to produce until now. According to Ageia representatives, Nvidia is considering to launch more dedicated PhysX accelerator add-in cards, rather than to merge it on Nvidia's graphics cards.

Nvidia has become notorious for its purchases over the time. There was nothing Nvidia wanted that got away from its claws (Havok may be an exception, however). Sometimes it would discontinue the company's product lines and take over its technology, as it happened shortly after the purchase of 3dfx. Nvidia ceased to sell Voodoo graphics cards instantly and would provide faint support to the already sold cards. Some other times, the company would rebrand some products, as in the case of mobile chip developer MediaQ.

Shortly after Nvidia took over Ageia's business, it promised it would deliver "GeForce-accelerated PhysX" graphics cards, but no one can figure out what will finally happen to Ageia's physics chips. The physics processing units manufactured by Ageia until now did not become extremely popular among the PC gamers, since current gaming titles are barely optimized to work with the hardware processing units. However, many gamers have heard about it, although they never bothered to buy it, so Nvidia would not have a hard time promoting the dedicated physics hardware.

"We are still committed to hardware-accelerated physics and will support existing PPU customer commitments, as well as future business, as demand dictates. As long as there is demand, Nvidia will do what's right to support [dedicated PhysX PPUs]," said Michael Steele, vice president of marketing at Ageia.

It seems reasonably for Nvidia to continue providing support and even developing the Ageia PhysX PPUs. Moreover, given the fact that Nvidia has some strings to make game developers obey its rules, it could convince them to optimize their creations for the hardware PPU.

"Nvidia wants to be open in its further development of PhysX software in order to enable as many platforms as possible on both PC and console. Nvidia understands better than anyone the need to enable a large and unrestricted market for game developers. I don't think anyone will question their unique capabilities to support the development community. Enabling a physics eco-system and then delivering the best hardware for that environment is good for gaming," Steele added.