AMD announces physics optimization partnership with Havok

Posted on Thursday, June 12 2008 @ 18:31 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Havok got acquired by Intel last year while NVIDIA got their hands on AGEIA a couple of months ago, leaving us wondering what AMD's move would be. Today there's a lukewarm answer - the company teamed up with Intel's Havok to jointly investigate the optimization of physics effects on the AMD platform. However, it seems like AMD wants to keep its options open as the firm doesn't exclude a possible future cooperation with NVIDIA to run the AGEIA PhysX technology on their graphics cards.
With over 100 developers and 300 leading titles already using Havok’s physics engine - Havok Physics – the company has clearly defined its position as the leading developer of game physics. By working together, both companies are demonstrating their commitment to open standards and continued support for the needs of the game community.

“As the complexity and visual fidelity of video games increases, AMD wants to take advantage of opportunities to improve the game experience,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “By working with the clear market leader in physics software, AMD can optimize our platforms to consistently deliver the best possible visual experience to the gamer.”
While NVIDIA taps into the vast computing power of its GPUs to do the physics processing AMD seems primarly interested in working with Havok to optimize physics processing on its Phenom processors:
Havok Physics scales extremely well across the entire family of AMD processors, including quad-core products such as the AMD Phenom X4. As part of the collaboration, Havok and AMD plan to further optimize the full range of Havok technologies on AMD x86 superscalar processors. The two companies will also investigate the use of AMD’s massively parallel ATI Radeon GPUs to manage appropriate aspects of physical world simulation in the future.

“The success of Havok as a cross platform software company is predicated on our willingness to listen to the needs of our customers,” said David O’Meara, managing director of Havok. “The feedback that we consistently receive from leading game developers is that core game play simulation should be performed on CPU cores. The clear priority of game developers is performance and scalability on of the CPU. Beyond core simulation, however, the capabilities of massively parallel products offer technical possibilities for computing certain types of simulation. We look forward to working with AMD to explore these possibilities.”

Today’s game experience demands a balanced platform approach, one that combines the right CPU and GPU horsepower. A number of game aspects, including advanced physics processing, are optimized for CPUs, while the latest DirectX 10.1 games demand the latest GPUs. AMD is striving to deliver the best of both worlds, with highly capable CPU and GPU technology that partners like Havok can use as their canvas to deliver the best experience possible.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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