PS3 and Havok (Famitsu Article)
- Thread starter BlueTsunami
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Havok 4.5 released, big performance increase
San Francisco, Calif., Jan. 23, 2007 – Havok announces today the official release of Havok 4.5, the latest update to its modular suite of artist tools and run-time technology. Fully optimized for Sony PLAYSTATION®3, as well as Microsoft Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii, Havok 4.5 dramatically accelerates the development of cross-platform, cutting edge electronic games, meeting the needs of the world’s top developers and producers. Havok 4.5 allows game developers to scale game content to thousands of dynamically-driven game objects and characters, harnessing the full power and speed of next generation architectures.
Game developers using Havok Physics and Havok Animation products to develop for PS3 will be able to harness the full power of all the SPUs, while maintaining the complete flexibility of the Havok SDK. Havok architecture now scales strongly across all SPUs and runs between 5 and 10 times faster than Havok 4.0 for a typical game scene on the PS3.
http://www.havok.com/content/view/448/53/
San Francisco, Calif., Jan. 23, 2007 – Havok announces today the official release of Havok 4.5, the latest update to its modular suite of artist tools and run-time technology. Fully optimized for Sony PLAYSTATION®3, as well as Microsoft Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii, Havok 4.5 dramatically accelerates the development of cross-platform, cutting edge electronic games, meeting the needs of the world’s top developers and producers. Havok 4.5 allows game developers to scale game content to thousands of dynamically-driven game objects and characters, harnessing the full power and speed of next generation architectures.
Game developers using Havok Physics and Havok Animation products to develop for PS3 will be able to harness the full power of all the SPUs, while maintaining the complete flexibility of the Havok SDK. Havok architecture now scales strongly across all SPUs and runs between 5 and 10 times faster than Havok 4.0 for a typical game scene on the PS3.
http://www.havok.com/content/view/448/53/
Thats awesome news. Atlast we may be seeing the potential of the Cell being expressed easilly and for real
That's pretty cool news. Havok spoke as a guest at an IBM presentation on Cell in Dublin a couple of months ago, and they apparently gushed over its potential - but with the caveat that they'd basically need to rearchitect their code to reap the full benefit, that porting wasn't a good option. They said they were expecting big improvements over time as they started doing that, so perhaps this is their first big step up. 5-10x faster over the previous version (assuming that's an honest assessment) is a surprising jump.
And yeah, I'm also wondering how Heavenly Sword might benefit...although NT may well have been designing with this kind of capability in mind from the start, rather than it coming as a surprise to them
And yeah, I'm also wondering how Heavenly Sword might benefit...although NT may well have been designing with this kind of capability in mind from the start, rather than it coming as a surprise to them
Mr. Domino
Regular
And yeah, I'm also wondering how Heavenly Sword might benefit...although NT may well have been designing with this kind of capability in mind from the start, rather than it coming as a surprise to them
Isn't it a bit too late for HS or MotorStorm to benefit from this or is it just a matter of updating the Havok engine and it all works better almost automatic?
If I know anything about how this kind of stuff works, then I think Motorstorm probably got beta-versions very early on. I don't think Havok just develops this kind of stuff in a dark room without involving any of its clients. Stuff like this is too cutting edge ... it's like the Epic guys, continuously working together with developers to add and improve features. Eventually it will result in a new official version released to the 'public', but behind the scenes Havok customers will probably already have been testing stuff.
However for Motorstorm it may have been too late to actually greatly benefit from this increase in performance by adding new features or anything like that.
However for Motorstorm it may have been too late to actually greatly benefit from this increase in performance by adding new features or anything like that.
Well depending on HS's stage of development, I'm not sure..
If everything just suddenly runs faster on the physics side, it probably either would be a case of "well, now everything's running as we hoped it would" (i.e. they already designed with that kind of performance in mind), or "wow, we now have more spare capacity, what should we do with it? can we do anything with it within our schedule?".
I'm guessing it should be reasonably straightforward and easy to update to the new version, assuming it does not break any legacy code or require new code to take advantage of. Maybe someone working with it could answer for you better.
edit - although as Arwin says, there's probably nothing 'sudden' about these improvements at least for some of Havok's customers. They may have rolled out improvements over time, culminating in a 4.5 release.
And yeah, I'm also wondering how Heavenly Sword might benefit...although NT may well have been designing with this kind of capability in mind from the start, rather than it coming as a surprise to them
Yeah, i hope they had the time to implement it. [and make Nariko's hair even more realistic
]If you read on in the very articel, one could be led to this conclusion:
So that could mean they worked along with the Havoc team to get Havoc 4.5 working specifically on the PS3. I wonder if their is much performance gain on other platforms as well, at least nothing like that is mentioned in this article...
Well the article seems to suggest that Havoc 4.5 runs 5-10 times faster than Havoc 4.0 on the PS3. It's probably fair to say that the PS3 version would have struggled more than the other versions previously due to the major reengineering work required to get it to use the SPUs optimally, so it had more headroom to improve. Who knows how 4.5 compares across platforms though, although it's a fair guess that the PS3 is probably one of the quickest (if not the quickest) implementations.
I'm sure other platforms have seen improvements, but the nature (and scale) of the highlighted PS3 improvement was probably specific to it given how it was achieved (i.e. SPU improvements).
Probably true, but even at that Havok themselves pegged PS3's 4.0 performance as equivalent to 3 PC CPUs in the benchmark posted earlier in this thread, from some months back. That was using 4 SPUs. So it's probably fair to say it was offering good performance relative to other platforms even then, even if it was under-performing versus the PS3's own potential.
Probably true, but even at that Havok themselves pegged PS3's 4.0 performance as equivalent to 3 PC CPUs in the benchmark posted earlier in this thread, from some months back. That was using 4 SPUs. So it's probably fair to say it was offering good performance relative to other platforms even then, even if it was under-performing versus the PS3's own potential.
inefficient
Veteran
See this image from the original posters URL.
This is from last August with Havok physics version 4.0. With the PPU + 4 SPUs it was already faster than a PC Desktop CPU with 3 cores. Now they don't give the exact specs of the PC CPU they used, but we would seem reasonable they are comparing it with something high end.
So 5-10x faster than what they were getting back then is very impressive.
And that shouldn't come as any great surprise. Cell is actually quite good at some functions...
Just to back up for a second and look back at that performance comparison slide...what sort of triple core PC CPU were they using? AFAIK such things do not exist..?
And they weren't just taking the figure for one core and dividing by 3 to project the performance with 3 cores..
edit - although as I've had pointed out to me, they could have used a quad-core and just ran the code on 3 out of the 4 cores..which makes sense.
And they weren't just taking the figure for one core and dividing by 3 to project the performance with 3 cores..
edit - although as I've had pointed out to me, they could have used a quad-core and just ran the code on 3 out of the 4 cores..which makes sense.
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right. And there is really no context to that slide. 2PPu threads plus 4SPUs (six threads) at how much utilization? for all intents and purposes virtually the entire cell is at work for that solution. same goes for the 3 core PPU (six threads? we dunno).
Not enough info to really tell. But a speedup is good nevertheless. From the newsstory we dont know if the .5 update was specifically for SPUs or if the improvement impacts other core distributions... Havok 5 might improve everything else...
That statement doesn't give any idea of improvements to other architectures. It says development is sped up for all platforms, and Havok 4.5 takes advantage of all next-gen architectures. No word on scale of improvements for non-Cell architectures though. If it's dramatically improved across the board, why not say so? Havok is competing against other physics solutions, so surely they'll want to toot any improvements. I'd have thought there'd be a line something like...
"Havok 4.5 achieves a speed-up of as much as 2x with our optimized next-gen algorithms, and as much as 5-10x speed-up on PS3 thanks to efficient SPU implementation."
If Havok was already fairly well optimized for multicore and vector units, the room for improvement on XeCPU and PC would be limited, unless the original engine wasn't too hot! My inclination is that development across the board is efficient and great for multiplatform, there're some efficiency improvements across the board, and the re-engineering of the SPU implementation has resulted in large increases in Cell performance which they are making a big announcement of to attract PS3 developers to Havok over the alternatives.
You've two full SPEs free there, actually. The 3 cores are PC cores also, not PPUs. If that was 3 out of 4 in a quad core, there'd be proportionately as much left over on the Cell in that scenario as in the PC CPU, if not a little more (one quarter of the PC CPU would remain versus one third of the SPEs, or 2/7 'cores'). It's hard to tell how 'full' the PPE and SPUs are there, though, how much room would be left on it for anything else...ditto with the PC cores. When you look at some of the stuff we've publically had access to on PS3, at least, it can be quite amazing how much SPU time can go to waste even if something is quoted as using 1/2/3/4/5 whatever SPUs just in an effort to keep things simple. So even discounting the 2 free SPUs, I'd be loathed to say those 4 SPUs were even being fully utilised. That might be part of the reason we have this big increase too..better per-SPU utilisation, since I doubt anyone was initially doing a perfect job of making sure they weren't going idle at all (and probably still aren't, but it's definitely an area where improvement can be made).
I'd guess looking at the single PPE figures that the scaling isn't linear also, so you might get performance that isn't too far off that figure with one less SPU there. The returns probably diminished as you added a fourth..
Of course, scaling is reportedly improved in 4.5, so hopefully that's not the case (any more at least), and every additional SPU brings a decent performance improvement for a given workload.
