Ageia, founded in 2002, was a fabless semiconductor company. In 2004, Ageia acquired NovodeX, the company who created PhysX – a Physics Processing Unit chip capable of performing game physics calculations much faster than general purpose CPUs; they also licensed out the PhysX SDK (formerly NovodeX SDK), a large physics middleware library for game production.[1]
 | |
| Industry | Semiconductors |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2002 |
| Defunct | February 13, 2008 |
| Fate | Acquired by and merged into Nvidia Corporation |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, United States |
Key people | Manju Hegde, CEO Curtis Matthew Davis, COO, President, & Co-founder |
| Products | Physics Processing Units Physics engines |
| Website | www |
Ageia was noted as being the first company to develop hardware designed to offload calculation of video game physics from the CPU to a separate chip, commercializing it in the form of the Ageia PhysX, a discrete PCI card.[2] Soon after the Ageia implementation of their PhysX processor, ATI and Nvidia announced their own physics implementations.[3]
On September 1, 2005, AGEIA acquired Meqon, a physics development company based in Sweden. Known for its forward-looking features and multi-platform support, Meqon earned international acclaim for its physics technology incorporated in 3D Realms’ Duke Nukem Forever and Saber Interactive's TimeShift.[4]
On February 4, 2008, Nvidia announced that it would acquire Ageia.[5] On February 13, 2008, the merger was finalized.[6][7]
The PhysX engine is now known as Nvidia PhysX, and has been adapted to be run on Nvidia's GPUs.[8]