When Ageia first announced their PhysX-branded physics processing unit (PPU), they trumpeted it as the next logical addition to graphic processing units (GPU) to handle increasingly complex physics functions in games. Ultimately the add-in card never made a huge splash and Ageia was bought out by Nvidia. id Founder John Carmack, who was never a fan of PPUs, recently elaborated on his position at QuakeCon 2009 [thanks Blue's News].
"I think I was fairly public about my thinking that that was a really bad idea, and in fact it was pretty clear to me from early on that the whole idea for that was to do a startup to be acquired," said Carmack. "I actually had a really quite negative opinion about stuff like that because they went out, they evangelized, they got some people to buy a piece of hardware that I didn't think was actually a good technical direction for things on there; certainly was going to be supplanted by later generations of more integrated compute resources on there. I don't think it was a good idea, I certainly wasn't a backer of the company, and I hope Nvidia didn't pay a whole lot of money for them."
Ageia was right in that physics effects are a big part of modern games, but in-game physics are usually handled by a multi-threaded CPU and not a dedicated piece of hardware.
