Futuremark Licenses AGEIA PhysX SDK for Inclusion in Industry-Leading Benchmarks

– AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc., the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games, today announced that Futuremark has signed an agreement to license the AGEIA PhysX™ SDK for use in future products. The inclusion of AGEIA PhysX technology will add comprehensive physics benchmarking to Futuremark’s traditional battery of performance tests for 3D graphics, CPUs, memory and other component and system parameters.

Among other benefits, the use of AGEIA PhysX technology in Futuremark’s high profile client demos and benchmarks will provide an objective measurement of the tremendous improvements in physics performance enabled by the AGEIA PhysX processor. Upcoming Futuremark benchmarks also will test the performance of the AGEIA software physics engine on various hardware configurations in real-life game scenarios. As the world’s only multithreaded API for physics, the AGEIA PhysX SDK should excel in exploiting multi-core CPU architectures, which will be the standard in next-generation processors. In addition to raw performance, the multithreaded AGEIA PhysX SDK should also provide consistent scalability, maintaining high performance even with large numbers of objects in a scene.

"Physics performance is becoming an increasingly important factor in games, and the AGEIA PhysX SDK will enable us to create reliable standards for measuring not only software, but also hardware accelerated physics," said Tero Sarkkinen, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Futuremark. "Our testing methodology used to create Futuremark benchmarks is developed in close cooperation with PC technology industry leaders, and we look forward to working with AGEIA to enable extensive physics in our future products with the high levels of accuracy and usability that people expect from Futuremark.”

Futuremark benchmarks are the de facto world standard for measuring hardware performance, and are particularly useful for AGEIA’s target customers in the game industry, which include game publishers, developers and consumers, as well as PC OEMs and add-in board manufacturers. Futuremark benchmarks are also the benchmark of choice for the majority of the world's computer and gaming publications.

“Futuremark benchmarks are the gold standard for measuring performance in both systems and components, and we’re excited that they’ve chosen AGEIA to help build a comprehensive measure of physics performance,” said Manju Hegde, founder and CEO of AGEIA. “We look forward to having Futuremark begin establishing the next level in multithreaded, multi-core physics based benchmarks.”

About Futuremark® Corporation
Futuremark ® Corporation is the leading provider of performance analysis software and services for PCs and smartphones. Futuremark® is known around the world for its benchmark products, including the 3DMark® and PCMark® Series and SPMark™ (with more than 30 million copies distributed worldwide) and value-added services powered by a database of over 12 million real life benchmarking results. Futuremark® maintains offices in Saratoga, California and Helsinki, Finland. For more information, please visit http://www.futuremark.com.

About AGEIA
AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company and the pioneer of hardware-accelerated physics for games. Its flagship product, the PhysX processor, is the world’s first dedicated physics processing unit – a completely new hardware category. The PhysX processor and supporting software deliver the processing horsepower to calculate real-time interactive worlds. Developers can define these worlds to obey the laws of classical physics, or create their own physical laws that make their game a unique, hyper-dimensional experience.

AGEIA seeks to ignite innovation in the games industry by working with leading developers, publishers, add-in board vendors and console manufacturers to deliver the next generation of physically immersive entertainment. Consumer add-in boards and systems equipped with the AGEIA PhysX processor and games that take advantage of the technology will be available in late 2005. For more information visit http://www.ageia.com.