TeamXbox has a lengthy interview with the CEO of AGEIA Technologies, Manju Hegde, whose company is building the first dedicated Physics Processing Unit (PPU) called the PhysX chip. This technology is being touted as the next big thing in gaming, almost as important as the first 3D card.

AGEIA's PhysX chip is the world's first dedicated PPU. With AGEIA's groundbreaking new technology, developers can now create scenes using the same laws of physics that govern the physical universe, enabling players to interact with any object in any scene at any time, providing pervasive interactive reality. In concert with the CPU and GPU, the PhysX chip will allow game developers to create characters, backgrounds and effects that rival those of Hollywood movies, but with interactivity.

The company already has the backing of Ubisoft, Epic Games, and Microsoft. When asked if we'd see this in a next-gen console, Hedge said, "On this one, you will have to wait."

NVidia has released version 71.89 of the ForceWare drivers for GeForce powered videocards. The new release fixes a problem with overclocking not working in SLI mode, and also adds support for the GeForce 6200 with TurboCach, NVIDIA PureVideo, and NVIDIA SLI. Thanks Blues.

The Inquirer has run two articles the past two days that broke down the costs of video cards by looking at their individual components. First they started with nVidia and their 5750 card. When the card was retailing for $199, its bill of materials ran around $99.40. They followed this up with a look at ATI's X600PRO PCIe card.

ATI is getting $59.00 dollars for the chip. This card uses eight memory chips clocked and priced at $3.90 per piece. This makes the total cost of memory to $31.20 for a whole pack of 128MB of 128 bit memory. The PCB (printed circuit board) in this case costs $15 and makes a total bill of materials (BOM) for the card at $105.20.

NVidia has released a new WHQL certified ForceWare driver, 71.84, for GeForce powered videocards. PDF format release notes are here, showing fixes for Star Wars: Republic Commando, Half-Life 2, NHL2005 and World of Warcraft.

Computer Games Magazine has a new Q&A with AGEIA President and COO Curtis Davis, asking him about the PhysX chip which we heard about yesterday. Topics include the formation of the company, features possible due to the PhysX PPU, and getting the product to market.

Fabless semiconductor company Ageia has announced their plans to release PhysX, a dedicated physics processor designed to co-exist with existing GPU and CPU chips. With PhysX, games can go from having a few dozen physics objects to 30,000 to 40,000 of them. Gamers Depot talks why and how with Ageia CEO Manju Hegde and COO Curtis Davis and on GameSpot you can find a Q&A with Tim Sweeney, as Epic will be supporting the PhysX PPU.

GS: Can you give examples of how a game might be able to increase realism with the help of a PPU?
TS: When people talk about physics in recent games, they mostly think of Unreal Tournament 2004's vehicles or Half Life 2's dynamic objects. There, you have tens or perhaps 100 big objects interacting physically in an otherwise static environment. Knocking chairs and tables around is fun, but that's hardly the apex of physics simulation! The next steps are realistic dynamic environments, fluid simulation, large-scale particle simulation, and other very large-scale physical phenomenon. If you look at a modern action or sci-fi movie, and what's possible with the non-realtime computer graphics effects there, it's clear that major new physics innovations will be introduced into gaming as hardware performance increases 10X, 100X, and more.

Ageia is still working out deals with add-in board partners, but hopes to have various PPU solutions out this Christmas.

Tech Report, Viper Lair, BigBruin, Hexus, PC Perspective and The Tech Zone have posted previews of the VIA PT chipset series, which the company is launching today. The PT880 Pro, PT894 and PT894 Pro are supposed to compete against Intel's 915 and 925 chipset.

PCWorld.com has a story up about Electronic Arts & Vivendi Universal Games, who are announcing at CES that they are supporting Sony's Blu-ray disc format. A bit strange to be sure. For console systems they have to support whatever Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo uses, and on the PC they still aren't using the DVD format after all these years, so this seems symbolic support more than anything else. Thanks HomeLAN Fed.

A little happy fun lawsuit threatening for your lunch time. As many people know 3DMark comes under quite a bit of scrutiny given the popularity of the benchmark with the 03 release being dismissed by more than a few websites. HardOCP was was one of the vocal websites with their opinions and Futuremark thought threatening a lawsuit would be fun after seeing criticism of the 05 release. The first email:

I strongly advise you to not to slander our product, 3DMark, on your web site. Take down all your false and unjustified and baseless claims about 3DMark. 

HardOCP responded with a "wha?" and here was the response from Futuremark:

You know what I mean. Your articles have consistently discredited 3DMark for years now and the few justifications there have sometimes been have been without merit. It seems to us as if you have something against our product personally and are using your popular website as a platform to attack and trying to discredit on purpose and with baseless claims and sometimes also with erroneous information.

I will no longer communicate with you after this. Our attorney is looking that this situation will get resolved and will contact you if necessary.

Tero Sarkkinen
Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Futuremark Corporation

Tero however appears to have shortly later realized how incredibly silly these threats were and posted a public apology. Go ahead, lets all chuckle together!

HardOCP has taken a very early look at upcoming VIA K8T890 chipsets, which will finally bring PCI-Express support to the AMD Athlon 64 platform when it is used on motherboards in a few months.

The folks at Futuremark have released their latest and greatest benchmark suite for everyone to play with 3DMark 05. You can go straight to download fun over at FileShack or you can read a bit more about it at TechReport

The app uses "pure" DirectX 9, unlike the previous version, and the floating-point-enabled Shader Model 2.0 is now a baseline. 3DMark05 dynamically generates shader code in Microsoft's High Level Shader Language and supports a broad range of shader compile targets, so it can take best advantage of the Radeon X700/X800 series via Shader Model 2.0b and the GeForce 6 series via Shader Model 3.0.

New on HomeLAN Fed this morning is this Q&A with Robert Krakoff of Razer, who answers questions about his company's upcoming Diamondback mouse for the PC.

New on Gaming Groove today is a Q&A with Cameron Rogers of Shuttle, the company behind those small form factor PCs and cases. The Q&A focuses on the new Shuttle SN95G5, an Athlon 64 powered machine targetted at hardcore gamers.

FiringSquad has fired up another Counter-Strike: Source beta performance article. This time they take a look at how 15 different sub-$200 videocards perform.

The guys at Tech-Report as well as FiringSquad have done some much more in depth benchmarking of ATI vs NVidia on the Source engine. It looks like the very top-end ATI card have an edge but the guys who already got a 6800GT because of DOOM3 should be happy with these results:

Down at $399, though, it's a different story. The GeForce 6800 GT slightly but surely outperforms the Radeon X800 Pro without aniso and AA. With 4X AA and 8X aniso, the two cards are virtually tied across all four resolutions we tested.

Early Source benchmarks are hitting the net and it appears that much like NVidia spanked ATI in DOOM3, ATI is handing out spankings in Source. Here are a few more scores

GameSpot is reporting that Sega will soon be releasing a version of the Saturn game pad for PC and Macs in Japan (and import stores soon after I'm sure). The white colored controller will retail for $29 when it goes on sale July 23.

Coverage of the Computex tradeshow continues. Hexus has articles on ASUS and Silverstone's TJ-06. There's a photo gallery at The Tech Zone. Legit Reviews takes a look at all the heatsinks.

More coverage of the Computex hardware tradeshow can be found at Hardware Analysis, Hardware Zoom and AnandTech, while Tech Report has several stories up: DFI motherboards, Biostar SFF BTX chassis, ASROCK K8 combo motherboard, Shuttle P-Series case.

Three Computex articles on Anand Tech: early bird coverage, More NV45 Information and NV45 Mystery Solved. Coverage can also be found at Hardware Analysis, and The Inquirer.