My man junk is still the biggest thing 27 years running.
But havok physics are already ran on valve games with little performance penalty for the calculations. I see this as more of a attempt to sell more cards by Nvidia, not so much as a actual performance or breakthrough for the gaming community.
Physics on Valve games are a joke compared to what hardware physics can do, and what we should have on games allready. A really bad joke, and so are most of the new games that have been released since then. Taking into account the realism achieved in graphics engines, the realism in physics and interactivity with the world, or the interactivity of the world within itself is laughable. The only game that I would save from burning when it comes to physics is Crysis, and it only scratches what a gameworld should be.
But that's exactly what I was saying. Havok physics are as good as Ageia's but they lacked the hardware acceleration and without it, the best you can do with a CPU, even a Quad, is what Crytek did in Crysis, which are IMO the best physics seen in a game to date, thanks to their own physics engine.
Havok did see they needed some kind of hardware acceleration and started to design GPU physics along with Ati and Nvidia. But before they coud achieve anything Intel adquired Havok, coincidence? Remember what I said about Intel trying to slow down physics adoption?
I guess, based on what you said, that physics are not for you. You might be OK with HL2's level of physics, but that's by no means close to what most gamers could expect from a game. If you can "survive" with HL2 physics, you could survive with HL2 graphics forever too. I was wanting some kind of physics and interactivity with the world since Duke 3D and got nothing relevant until Severance: Blade of Darkness in 1999. Since then until HL2 anything new, and since then until Crysis the same.
Now I want true fully destructible environments, like the one showed in the revamped Unreal Engine 3.5 demo, but with a ton more particles and realism. I want smoke or water or any fluid being displaced by the wind, NPC, objects, bullets (hell, I want to see a blue smoke displacing a red smoke in real time!! And at the same time realistically mixing with it of course.)... I want decent cloth applied to NPCs, curtains, posters on the walls, newspapers in the ground... I want realistically deformable objects based on their expected properties. And I want this to be applied to everyting in the gameworld without frames going down. Crysis does some better and more abundant physics than other games, but when lots of particles interact with each other, even Quads go down to one cypher frames. I want more and I want it to run smooth.
I never bought Ageia's physics, because the lack of support in games and the high price. An add in card would never work in the market, that was my opinion, but if two or three games would have shown anything really interesting, something that couldn't be emulated in the CPU, i waould have bought it. The problem with the games was that developers couldn't justify the expenses of doing 2 separate games, one with Ageia and the other for the CPU, and they couldn't make a game to only run with Ageia hardware, because the user base was minimal, so they ended up doing the same with some minor enhancements and using the hardware to liberate CPU cycles. The problem with this is that the game was propably using only 10% of its power for the physics, so it was pointless. Nvidia can do both price and support a lot better. Making a game that can only run with hardware accelerated Ageia physics makes sense now, considering that any 8 series and up cards could run it.
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