During Nvidia"s fourth-quarter financial results conference call, Nvidia shed a little more light on its acquisition of Ageia and what it plans to do with the firm"s PhysX technology. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that Nvidia"s strategy is to take the PhysX engine and port it onto CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a C-like application programming interface Nvidia developed to let programmers write general-purpose applications that can run on GPUs. All of Nvidia"s existing GeForce 8 graphics processors already support CUDA, and Huang confirmed that the cards will be able to run PhysX.
"We"re working toward the physics-engine-to-CUDA port as we speak. And we intend to throw a lot of resources at it. You know, I wouldn"t be surprised if it helps our GPU sales even in advance of [the port"s completion]. The reason is, [it"s] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes. . . . Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA."