Havok FX: Accelerated Physics on NVIDIA GPUs Preview - PAGE 1

NVIDA and Havok will demonstrate their GPU powered game physics engine at the Game Developer's Conference, which runs from March 21st through the 24th in San Jose, California.

We wish to thank NVIDIA for allowing us to reproduce some of the slides from their press update presentation.

Instead of just a dry regurgitation of NVIDIA's press release, we thought we'd dig a bit deeper, and give you an idea what running physics on a GPU (or a stand alone physics engine such as the AGEIS PhysX) may mean to your gaming experience.

Is it all just marketing hype? Or is there really something to it?

In a game that uses the traditional approach to physics, the processor does all the calculations for inter-object interaction. Using a physics processor unit such as the AGEIS or Havok's FX, the physics calculations are off-loaded from the CPU to the GPU, and if we assume that the GPU is not totally occupied rendering visual effects, such off-loading allows far more realistic and complex physics effects to be portrayed in the games.

The Havok physics engine is implemented by utilizing the shader capabilities of Shader Model 3, using shaders to model physical interactions.

Here's what Havok's site says:

Havok FX - Hardware-Accelerated Physics That Won't Cost Gamers

Havok unveiled Havok FX for the first time and received strong praise from enthusiastic customers looking to push the envelope on visual effects in their PC games. Havok FX extends Havok's renowned game-play physics system by enabling thousands of objects to collide in real-time in a range of physical effects like debris, smoke, and fluids to add immense detail and believability to games.

Havok FX dispatches the effects physics to Shader Model 3 Class GPU's. With GPU's already a standard on the market, Havok FX is available to an estimated 50 million existing PC's

"Working with Havok, the leader in physics middleware development, we at NetDevil have always been looking for ways to continue to push physics in online gaming further than it has ever been pushed before. With the addition of Havok FX to the product line, we are excited about the possibilities of what we are going to be able to do in our future MMO projects to give our users an experience that they did not know was possible in video games", states Scott Brown, President at NetDevil.

"The Havok 4.0 release is a big next step for Havok, as we expand the solutions we offer to help reduce the overall cost and risk associated with the development of cross-platform games. Havok 4.0 strengthens our flagship physics and animation products, while introducing exciting new tools and run-time components that speed the development of unbelievable character performances in the game", states Jeff Yates, VP of Product Management at Havok.

So while Havok's joint announcement with NVIDIA at GDC was about their collaboration, it seems pretty clear from Havok's site that ATI GPU's will also be supported. Frankly, this is a very interesting approach. At the hardware level, the GPU's from ATI and NVIDIA are very different in implementation details; so if Havok had programmed to the "bare metal" they would almost certainly have had to have a totally separate implementation for every different GPU on the market. Instead, they apparently implemented physics purely using Shader Model 3.