AMD announces physics partnership with Havok

(custompc) -- Surprise move sees AMD cooperating with Intel’s physics branch to get Havok acceleration on both CPUs and GPUs

Many people predicted a sticky situation for AMD when it came to physics acceleration after Intel bought Havok, and AMD even admitted that talks had broken down between Havok and AMD after the acquisition. It looked even worse when Nvidia bought Ageia, and AMD even started talking about using Stanford’s Brook language for physics. However, in a surprise move, AMD has now announced that it’s back on track to offer gaming physics with Havok.

In a statement, AMD put aside its rivalry with Intel and claimed that ‘by working together, both companies are demonstrating their commitment to open standards and continued support for the needs of the game community.’ AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s graphics products group, Rick Bergman, described Havok as ‘the clear market leader in physics software’ and said that AMD would be working to optimise its ‘platforms to consistently deliver the best possible visual experience to the gamer.’

AMD is hoping to accelerate Havok Physics on both its multi-core CPUs and GPUs and claims that it’s ‘striving to deliver the best of both worlds.’ However, the main focus at the moment appears to be AMD’s CPUs. AMD and Havok say that they’re planning to optimise the ‘full range of Havok technologies on AMD x86 superscalar processors,' and AMD claims that ‘Havok Physics scales extremely well across the entire family of AMD processors.’

Havok’s managing director, David O’Meara, explained the priority for CPUs, saying that ‘the feedback that we consistently receive from leading game developers is that core game play simulation should be performed on CPU cores.’ However, he added that GPU physics acceleration could become a feature in the future, saying that ‘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.’

So where does this leave Nvidia with its GPU-acceleration of PhysX via CUDA? Will game developers happily work with two physics APIs? Let us know your thoughts.