Ageia Withdraws Xbox 360 PhysX Claims

PhysX offers technologies ranging from physical object interactions to fluid-based particle effects like water and smoke. It looks like Microsoft didn't appreciate that comment as today Ageia kinda withdrawed the claim.

Wednesday evening, Ageia vice president of marketing Andy Keane acknowledged that including those comparisons [between Xbox360 and PS3] in its presentation was a mistake, and that they were based on speculation from public specifications released on Microsoft. Although the company has tested its software on Xbox 360 development kits, Keane said, the tests were of extremely limited scope, and weren't designed to test the limitations of the hardware.

The summary of the information below is that AGEIA would like to go on record that we do not have data to support performance comparisons for the PS3 or Xbox360 that would impact any of our physics features, Keane said in an email, which was also sent to other news organizations. Specifically, statements that the Xbox360 cannot run fluid simulations are not correct. In addition, conclusions about relative performance should not have been stated or implied in our presentations.

The company has tested Novodex on single-core and dual-core PC processors, as well as the Ageia chip, so those comparisons remain valid, Keane said. The benchmarks run on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 simply tested to see if the SDK would run, and do not provide performance data, unlike the performance tests run on the PC systems.