Havocs reveal new physic Engine

[lanek]

Guru3D:
Havok announced the launch of a major new version of its industry-leading Havok Physics technology. The release is the culmination of more than 5 years of internal R&D effort.
It features significant technical innovations in performance, memory utilization, usability and simulation quality, and represents a major leap forward in physics simulation for games.


Designed from the ground up for the computing architectures that will define games for the next decade, this release targets next-generation home consoles, mobile and PC while continuing to offer full support for current generation consoles. "This release of Havok Physics marks the third major iteration of our physics technology since the company was founded 15 years ago. Although Havok Physics is widely recognized as the industry's leading physics solution, our R&D team is constantly striving to innovate and push the technology further," said Andrew Bond, Vice President of Technology for Havok.

"The result is a new engine core built around fully continuous simulation that enables maximum physical fidelity with unprecedented performance speeds. Beta versions of the technology have been in the hands of a number of leading developers for some time and we have seen dramatic performance gains with simulations running twice as fast or more, and using up to 10 times less memory. Additionally the new core's performance is extremely predictable, eliminating performance spikes. We are genuinely excited to see how game designers will harness the additional power that we are offering with this release."

"At 2K Czech, our games demand a physics solution that can scale efficiently and handle highly detailed interactive environments. Having recently moved to the next generation of Havok Physics, we've been blown away by how Havok's new physics technology is able to make highly efficient utilization of all available hardware cores with a very lean runtime memory footprint," said Laurent Gorga, Technical Director at 2K Czech. "This combination allows us to deliver the high quality simulation at the scale we need and we are really looking forward to making some incredible games with the new technology."

Havok is currently scheduling meetings for technical reviews of its latest Physics technology at GDC March 27th– March 29th.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Lower memory demands and increased performance for a CPU solution, apparently.
Meh...?
OpenCL or Direct Compute would've been magical words to turn that text into something much more exciting, but I guess that an Intel-owned company will work for what Intel does best (CPU) and not what Intel does worst (GPU).

Perhaps I'm wrong. Or maybe this is set to make a difference for mobile games in Vita, 3DS and Android (Havok have clearly shown interest in the Android market).


BTW, it's interesting to see 2K Czech making a testimony on Havok. Their last PC game was Mafia II, a "flagship" PhysX title.

 

[Arwin]

Havok was well optimised for SPEs back in the day, working together with the MotorStorm devs. Would expect most of their stuff to be optimised for various platforms, and I'm sure that if it hasn't been done yet already, next-gen consoles will use CUs for lots of stuff?

 

[liolio]

Lower memory demands and increased performance for a CPU solution, apparently.
Meh...?
OpenCL or Direct Compute would've been magical words to turn that text into something much more exciting, but I guess that an Intel-owned company will work for what Intel does best (CPU) and not what Intel does worst (GPU).

Well funnily enough latest Intel GPU do great at compute especially once you factored in power consumption and die size.

Anyway "magically" is quiet relevant no matter all the efforts made by either Nvidia or AMD not that many people are willing to jump in the "GPGPU" bandwagon.
As CPU move forward (in numbers of cores as well as SIMD capabilities) I don't expect GPU to gain significantly more traction that what they have now.
I don't mean it is not going to get used, just that for most calculations many cores CPU are likely to "win" (performances are irrelevant the point is market acceptance and we are not speaking of 3d graphics here or even games related calculations).

As you spoke of Intel I think they should comes with a proper throughput core (xeon phi 2.0), and sell chip with that kind of config 2 big cores 8 throughput cores, a relatively tiny GPU.
Overall the performance in 3d might be lower than the spending the silicon of the 8 cores on a bigger GPU but looking at what Dice did on the ps3 or even what INtel used to do (geometry was processed by the CPU cores in their old IGP), it should definitely works good enough.
Discussing the compared usefulness of 8 extra cores vs the GPU is imo a non topic.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Lower memory demands and increased performance for a CPU solution, apparently.
Meh...?
OpenCL or Direct Compute would've been magical words to turn that text into something much more exciting, but I guess that an Intel-owned company will work for what Intel does best (CPU) and not what Intel does worst (GPU).

Perhaps I'm wrong. Or maybe this is set to make a difference for mobile games in Vita, 3DS and Android (Havok have clearly shown interest in the Android market).


BTW, it's interesting to see 2K Czech making a testimony on Havok. Their last PC game was Mafia II, a "flagship" PhysX title.

I'm actually quite excited by this. As well, they are optimizing for the GPUs in the next gen consoles so I'd expect that should eventually make its way to PC.

Either way, maybe this will finally get Nvidia to do some serious work on the CPU side of PhysX on PC.

Regards,
SB