AGEIA Joins Futuremark Program

The makers of the PhysX PPU accelerator AGEIA has joined Futuremark’s 3DMark Benchmark Development Program. Futuremark whose 3DMark and PCMark programmes are widely regarded as the industry standard for graphical and system performance had this to say.

“Futuremark is pleased to welcome AGEIA to the 3DMark BDP. AGEIA brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in hardware acceleration of real-time physics to the BDP, and their advances in the marketplace offer great promise to the PC gaming environment”, said Oliver Baltuch, Futuremark’s VP of Sales and Marketing, North America. “AGEIA is fully committed to the development of fair and objective benchmarks and understands that as a result; consumers will get better performing hardware and software, and a more exciting gaming experience.”

Using hardware to accelerate compute-intensive advanced physics is our core business. Increasing the performance of specialized physics algorithms, typically requiring tremendous amounts of mathematical and logical calculations with massive memory bandwidth is important to us and our partners," said Manju Hegde, CEO of AGEIA. “AGEIA recognizes that our participation in the specification and development of Futuremark’s 3DMark will help us deliver the best performing physics acceleration solutions in the PC industry.”

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This is an interesting note as AGEIA’s PhysX PPU has been generally well received; it has not found too much commercial success due to the lack of gaming titles and the cost of the card which is equal to some mid-level graphical solutions. However this may all change as Futuremark Products are known for their ability to drive graphics development and with AGEIA’s participation it may lead to more game developers incorporating this solution in their release titles.