Ageia was founded in 2002. The first goal Ageia Technologies had in mind was designing a dedicated physics processing unit. Ageia where the first to release a dedicated Physics Processing Unit, this not only made games that support it could be more immersive, all other applications that made use of it will benefit about 2x the performance than a average dual core CPU. Because the card takes physical computation of the CPU's load this not only allows the CPU to perform other instructions, it also leaves room for the extreme physics computational power because it is 100% dedicated to its job. The engine is based around a newer version of Novodex Rocket. Novodex is a robust engine that can stably handle over 1000 rigid bodies with a decent multicore CPU.
On the 13 of February 2008 Ageia where bought buy Nvidia. Not long after there were beta drivers released which allows the GPU (or graphics card) to perform physical computation. Because the graphics card is then performing two major tasks (physics and graphics) with the extra use of the stream processes thanks to physics calculations the card will chock more with high settings. The choices are to cut down on physics, turn down graphical settings or purchase the discontinued PPU unless the graphics card can handle both tasks already as well.
Not long after Nvidia pitching in on the physics processing business ATI graphics cards also followed up along having PhysX drivers that will also be able to use hardware accelerated physics as in the GPU is a PPU. Ageai PhysX are now known as Nvida PhysX.
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