New Havok Physics Engine Disables Proprietary GPU Physics

[zekrahminator]

It's pretty obvious that nowadays, gamers want more than just pretty graphics in their games. The likes of Crysis, Half Life 2, Call of Duty 4 and BioShock all show that gamers really crave and enjoy realistic physics in their games. To make rendering physics easier, and to compete with Ageia's PhysX, both AMD and NVIDIA planned out physics rendering via the graphics card. Unfortunately for both of their plans, Havok is soon going to release the Havok FX engine. The Havok FX engine is responsible for calculating physics without any GPU support whatsoever, regardless of brands. If Havok FX is adopted across the board, then the prospect of GPU physics is off-limits until at least DirectX11. This is great news for Ageia, which would leave physics to physics processing units, and very bad news for AMD and NVIDIA, who have likely been perfecting their physics engines for the past two years.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[TheGuruStud]

ATI and Nvidia run the show with "endorsements" to game studios. They are not just going to let some punk ass company screw up their plans (a far superior design in terms of performance IMO). Ageia had a good idea, but either it was too soon to implement or the board/drivers just sucked, as judged from the negligible performance boost. Now, they're trying to cover their skinny asses by playing the monopoly style game.

Sorry, Ageia, you are not a huge company and don't have the power to push. You had a chance and failed, get over it.

edit: you could say intel could do a shove down the line, but they're outnumbered and I don't think game studios not owned by inhell want to piss off ATI/Nvidia.

 

[panchoman]

well since ageia might be bought by amd, we might be seeing amd's physics coming out very soon.

 

[Darknova]

ATI and Nvidia run the show with "endorsements" to game studios. They are not just going to let some punk ass company screw up their plans (a far superior design in terms of performance IMO). Ageia had a good idea, but either it was too soon to implement or the board/drivers just sucked, as judged from the negligible performance boost. Now, they're trying to cover their skinny asses by playing the monopoly style game.

Sorry, Ageia, you are not a huge company and don't have the power to push. You had a chance and failed, get over it.

edit: you could say intel could do a shove down the line, but they're outnumbered and I don't think game studios not owned by inhell want to piss off ATI/Nvidia.

You didn't read it did you? It's Havok, NOT ageia. Havok is owned by Intel.

 

[OrbitzXT]

Didn't Intel purchase Havok for the eventual release of the Larrabee processor? I remember reading back in like April this year that the processor alone can handle graphics processing with "tens of cores".

 

[Nemesis881]

I don't think the gaming community is going to like this at all... I mean some people pay thousands of dollars for their systems and they might not mean crap because of this.

 

[jocksteeluk]

lol no doubt Aegia shares increased slightly at this news and there's me thinking Aegia were irrelevant, weren't AMD proposing to buy Aegia?

 

[TheGuruStud]

You didn't read it did you? It's Havok, NOT ageia. Havok is owned by Intel.

Oh I read it, but it was right after I woke up
I guess the way I read it I thought they were making it to support only the ageia card, and I guess I interpolated ageia and havok sleeping together.

Note to self - don't read anything upon waking.