Nvidia today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire AGEIA Technologies, Inc., the industry leader in gaming physics technology.

AGEIA's PhysX software is widely adopted with more than 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony Playstation3, Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii and Gaming PCs.

"By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world," stated Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia.

Like graphics, physics processing is made up of millions of parallel computations. The Nvidia GeForce 8800GT GPU, with its 112 processors, can process parallel applications up to two orders of magnitude faster than a dual or quad-core CPU.

"The computer industry is moving towards a heterogeneous computing model, combining a flexible CPU and a massively parallel processor like the GPU to perform computationally intensive applications like real-time computer graphics," continued Mr. Huang. "Nvidia's CUDA technology broadens the parallel processing world to hundreds of applications desperate for a giant step in computational performance. Applications such as physics, computer vision, and video/image processing are enabled through CUDA and heterogeneous computing."

The acquisition remains subject to customary closing conditions.