Havok Unveils Next-Generation Physics Engine

[photonboy]

I'm sick of such cliches as "unprecedented... "; of COURSE there's a precedent, it's called Havok version 2.

 

[shin0bi272]

[citation][nom]nitrium[/nom]What are the key differences between Havok and nVidia's PhysX? Are they both GPU accelerated? Does Havok in principle run on any hardware configuration? Which is most likely to be the more mainstream (i.e. dominant) solution over the next few years?[/citation]
Not sure about v3 of havok but previous versions were not gpu accelerated and were run completely on the cpu. That limited the number of objects on the screen that could have physics to very few (less than 50 usually). Most other operations were pre-scripted (anyone remember the HL2 demo door kick fiasco?) and things like tiny pieces of metal or a tree could stop a tank (sadly this is still true in 99.99% of all games).

Nvidia (formerly Ageia, formerly some other company I cant remember right now) changed that by putting physics calculations on the GPU through a software platform called CUDA. Cuda is on every GPU since the 8800gt so there's no worry about not being able to run it these days unless you REALLY need to upgrade. Anyway, what nvidia's physx does is use the huge pipeline of the pci-e x16 slot and the nature of the video card's processor to render tens of thousands (in the Unreal engine 4 demo there's reportedly over a million particles being rendered real time) of objects that all have physics at once.

Then there's the price difference. Nvidia (like Ageia before them) gives out the physx SDK for free. Havok costs 250,000 dollars to add to your game.... and its not hardware accelerated!

How does nvidia physx work on amd gpus? Because its a software package that handles interactions in the game... it doesnt matter what gpu you have it will still render the basic smoke/ragdoll/destruction interactions. Its only accelerated on nvidia gpus because well nvidia says so first of all and second of all nvidia has the physx drivers with its cards (and unless they were to offer it separately again like they used to when it first debuted you cant get it any other way currently and an nvidia driver wont install on a computer without an Nvidia card in it), and the AMD gpus cant install CUDA because IIRC its hard coded into the card and they would have to license it from Nvidia to do so... Could they do that? yeah... will they? no probably not. Why? Probably because nvidia wont let them more than likely.

So what do we do about this? Well we have been hearing about amd's solution to hardware accelerate physics on any hardware (not sure if its cpu or gpu accelerated cause its been years since I looked at it) called bullet physics. It looks better than nvidia's physx (less stuff sticking to stuff its not supposed to and clipping through things its not supposed to) and is hardware independent. But if youve run the new 3dmark11 benchmark then youve seen bullet physics. For my money its way too much of a performance hit compared to nvidia's physx but thats just my opinion.