Intel Purchases Havok

Dr. Eggman writes "Gamasutra has the recent announcement; Intel has purchased Havok. 'As the firm noted, Havok 5 features enhancements to its core products, Havok Physics and Havok Animation, and introduces new features for Havok Behavior, a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game. Some of the games using Havok technology, particularly its Havok Physics solution, include BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Crackdown, and MotorStorm - the company is also rapidly developing and marketing further tool products.' No word on what (if anything) Intel plans to do with its new acquisition."

Comments

Re:What Intel's gonna do

[Broken scope]

Implementation is up to the actual developer, bungie didn't want realistic physics. They wanted "fun" physics.

Re:This is disturbing for cross-platform devs.

[LetterRip]

Perhaps they can look at Bullet - http://www.continuousphysics.com/Bullet/ a high performance cross platform physics library that is open source. I know it is optimized for XBox 360 and PS3 and I'm pretty sure it has been used for first tier games on both. Not sure though if it has been optimized for the Wii though.

LetterRip

Re:Why...?

[Anonymous Coward]

They did it with their C compiler in the past. When they detected anything but an Intel processor they didn't use the SMD instructions even when the processor indicated full support for SMD *IN THE INTEL DOCUMENTED WAY* You can Google for the details.

Re:Of course

[TheRaven64]

It's all about power consumption. For the last 20 years (longer, actually), there's been a trend towards dedicated silicon for various tasks, then back to putting it on the CPU when the CPU was fast enough (because one chip is cheaper than two). Then something changed. People started caring that their CPU was using 100W. GPUs are a very different architecture to CPUs. Even when CPUs run fast enough that you can get away without a GPU, you will probably still want one because the GPU will use a whole lot less power. Intel see this, and so they're going to be putting stream processing cores on their multicore CPUs. VIA already saw it with cryptography, which is why their otherwise anaemic chips do well in areas that require a lot of crypto functions; the dedicated silicon ups performance and drops power consumption.

The chip you will be using in ten years will have a lot of specialised cores, most of which will be exposed to the developer via libraries (as the GPU is via OpenGL now). The ones that aren't in use will be turned off to save power, the ones that are will use less power than doing the same thing on general purpose silicon.

Re:ODE

[Zeussy]

I have used ODE and I was actually quite disappointed with its performance compared to that of Bullet. Its feature set isn't as rich either. Convex hulls are not fully supported yet, and they are not very optimized. So far the best physics engine I have used is Bullet.

Bullet is open source, fast, feature rich. Supports Stable stacking amd even moving concave hulls.
ODE is open source but I found it slow, and a little feature poor.
Newton is closed source but free. I found you could easily bog it down and ragdoll performance was pitterful at the time I used it, Other problem is it highly relies on callbacks for updating everything, and very pedantic about where function calls have to be made.
My house mate is currently using PhysX in a project (he doesnt have a physx card) but the CPU implementation looks impressive and very smooth. The SDK for Ageia is free as well.

Re:Why not?

[Stregone]

AMD licenses the MMX and SSE crap from intel.