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AMD announces support for Havok Physics
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 12th June 2008
AMD says Havok will be accelerated across its full range of products - how long will it be before we see GPU-accelerated Havok Physics though?
AMD says that there are "over 100 developers and 300 leading titles already using Havok's physics engine," making it "the leading developer of game physics."
Naturally, this includes both AMD's CPUs and its ATI Radeon graphics cards and looks to be a case of two fingers at Nvidia. Indeed, Nvidia recently told bit-tech that PhysX has around 150 supported titles across all platforms.
We spoke to an Nvidia spokesperson who turned down the opportunity to comment at the time, but said that he'd come back to us with more information "very soon."
There are some things to think about here – the first is that the industry is starting to split, with proprietary technologies appearing on either side of the fence. I don't think that's a good thing for the PC gaming industry, as you'll get a situation where developers choose to develop for one particular hardware vendor (or two in the case of Havok).
Another thing to think about is that Havok is a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel, and Intel doesn't have a GPU at the moment – its bread and butter is in CPUs and will continue to be that way until 2009-2010. We've got to wait for Larrabee until Intel joins the fray and that makes me wonder how long it's going to be before we see GPU-accelerated Havok physics.
A lot of the groundwork would have already been done because ATI first talked about GPU-accelerated physics back at Computex 2005; however, the question is whether Intel will want to allow Havok physics to be accelerated on the GPU at the moment. After all, the company seemed upset by Nvidia's push to move video encoding and transcoding tasks onto the GPU—and to deliver massive performance increases in the process—so I can't help but wonder if Intel will hold GPU-accelerated physics off until it releases Larrabee.
Intel will want a bunch of killer applications (or at least middleware) available for developers to use as soon as Larrabee is available – one of those will very likely be physics, and another will be something revolving around Project Offset.
What do you make of all this? Discuss in the forums.
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Comments (22)
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yep, and that's all done on the CPU AFAIK.
Or, did I get that wrong?
not as yet, no.
intel is worried that if the install base is large for physx then developers will create titles for it, so maybe they brokered a deal to get ati into the havok game to act as a stop gap on the install base % so developers will continue to create new games that feature the havok engine.
then intel shafts ati later, without astroglide
Ouch.
PhysX is not superior. Ever play a game with support for PhysX? The whole idea was so that great physics don't cause a fps hit. But it does. A bad one at that. PhysX was a good idea with a terrible follow through. Not to mention that it hardly even added anything to the games. Most of the time it just gave you a bit more debris.
AMD is only doing this because they do not want to add a third option. There are already 2 clear physics solutions and they needed to pick one to back. PhysX is no longer an option, due to the Nvidia buyout, so their choice was already made. This comes at no surprise to me.
I dont know but its kind of weird this decision, i though AMD was closer to choose Nvidia's PhisX (no matter if CUDA is needed) than Intel's Havok.
But its supposed that AMD decision isnt close. And with the time can change. :)
Can AMD take the 2 options HAVOK and PhisX?? Kind of hybrid decision.
For to have total compatibility with all future game titles
No, nVIDIA is porting PhysX to CUDA.
Ahh... That makes sense.
Havok is the much better engine anyway. I've seen GRAW with and without PhysX.. and there is pretty much no difference, it's literally just a few extra black bits flying out from the centre of an explosion...
Sure, the tech demos were great... But I have yet to see a decent implementation. And Havok are reaching a point which pretty much matches PhysX in terms of physics objects on screen at once..
You can't add more debris and expect not to have a performance hit. You're rendering more objects at the same time, there has to be lower performance... Unless the PhysX is also unloading work from the GPU there is no way you can avoid it
Dude Physx was an actual addon card. Made by Ageia before Nvidia bought them out. It WAS offloading and it STILL had a performance hit.
Havok has had some great implementations in the past, but I can't help but feel a large portion of the engine really needs to be accelerated on the GPU to get the best performance/most realistic effects. The CPU will still be used for certain effects, but not all, because it's a better fit in some cases.
While I think the advancement of physics for gaming is great, I'm afraid that if the need to support two different physics engines without a standardized API will be another arguement for developers to work with consoles first.