Ageia to join 3DMark development

Futuremark and AGEIA announced that AGEIA has joined the 3DMark Benchmark Development Program. Futuremark has created the 3DMark Benchmark Development Program (BDP) to build partnerships with leading PC and gaming industry stakeholders that have an interest in the development unbiased benchmark software that accurately measures the performance of next generation technology and hardware. Futuremark provides all its BDP Members with specifications and pre-production versions of its benchmarks and, in turn, evaluates the feedback provided by those members.

"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."

AGEIA develops hardware solutions that accelerate processor intensive advanced physics, enabling dynamic interaction in extremely complex immersive 3D games. Their flagship processor, the AGEIA PhysX, is the world's first dedicated hardware accelerator for advanced physics. AGEIA currently lists over sixty content partners that plan to support physics hardware acceleration in the next generation gaming platforms.

"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," 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."