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

[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: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.