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

What Intel's gonna do

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Intel's gonna do what Intel always does - they're gonna turn that stuff into silicon. Expect a physics engine chip from Intel.

Re:What Intel's gonna do

[UltraAyla]

I think you're likely right. They can just use this acquisition to sell product.

However, I wonder if they might do something along the lines of creating "Havok accelerated quad cores" (or whatever). Pull a Microsoft/Internet Explorer and bundle a bit of hardware Havok acceleration into all (and it really must be all or close to all of their high end chips) of their chips. This makes a large portion of the market adopt it by default (large enough to make companies code for optimizations just like with Nvidia/ATI) and it's something that AMD cannot do. Soon, they have a desirable feature that the competition does not have (because even if AMD adds physics acceleration, it won't be Havok) and will have gamers going for their chips even more for that extra edge. The question is whether the initial investment/potential bump in chip prices is worth it to them.

Just a thought.

Re:What Intel's gonna do

[Hal_Porter]

Quad Core CPUs are pretty much going unused desktops.

Never used quad code, but on a Core Duo 2 Bioshock can max out both cores.

Of course, video games tend to handle things in a dumb way so the renderer will render frames as fast as it can - faster than the sync rate of the monitor, so not all of the CPU cycles are actually used usefully, but it does show that Bioshock is parallel enough to have two threads ready constantly.

Back in the old days, video games would have one CPU at 100% and the other essentially unused. I'm not sure how modern game engines do this and whether dual core is a special case they optimized for of course.

Re:What Intel's gonna do

[Spy Hunter]

I think they're going to make it run on Larrabee, their in-development x86-based graphics card to compete with GeForce and Radeon. It's hard to imagine a more perfect match, actually.

Re:What Intel's gonna do

[nschubach]

Alot of old game engines loved using closed loops for the main render loop. Something similar to:

while(true) { addObjects(); doSomething(); render(); if (checkForExit()) break; }

Which would tie up one thread entirely processing that one loop and anything called off it. These types of engines are the ones that you see using 100% of a single core and leaving the other core at 2-3%. Part of the problem is that OpenGL and DirectX are largely dependent on things being done in a particular order (translate scene, add objects, translate camera, render) and anything outside that order is fatal.

Why...?

[chris_eineke]

No word on what (if anything) Intel plans to do with its new acquisition.

That's an easy one: Make it run artificially worse on AMD processors. (See also: Skype)

Re:Why...?

[pchan-]

That's an easy one: Make it run artificially worse on AMD processors. (See also: Skype) You mean they will kill the port to AMD's ATI-brand GPUs, which are moving into physics simulation and need the Havok engine which runs many games.

This is disturbing for cross-platform devs.

[Samir Gupta]

All game consoles of the current generation use non-Intel chips. Amongst games devs, Havok are reowned for their quality technical support, and the work they put into tweaking their physics engine for all the platforms, Intel PCs, AMD, and PPC consoles.

What's to say Havok won't "focus" their optimization efforts in the future on Intel exclusively?

This is sort of like what Sony did with SN systems (a very good maker of third-party dev tools for consoles) and then dropping all support for non-Sony platforms.

What will this do to GPU physics?

[MSRedfox]

Both ATI and Nvidia's GPU based physics acceleration were being made to work with Havok. ATI was working on a 3 card Crossfire rig, 2 for graphics, 1 for physics. I wonder what this will mean for future developments. http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html

ODE

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm amazed how rarely it gets mentioned, but you know, there is an open competitor, sort of. I say "sort of" because I've never actually written a game that needed physics, so I don't know whether ODE is to Havok as OpenGL/SDL is to DirectX/D3D.

Also raises the question: Will Intel force everyone to use Havok to take advantage of any physics-related silicon they develop? Or will they be friendlier to ODE? Or will they not create any physics-specific silicon, and make this whole discussion moot?