Tuesday, March 12th 2013
Havok Launches Next Generation Physics Engine
Havok, a leading provider of interactive 3D game technology, today announced the launch of a major new version of its industry-leading Havok Physics technology. The release is the culmination of more than 5 years of internal R&D effort. It features significant technical innovations in performance, memory utilization, usability and simulation quality, and represents a major leap forward in physics simulation for games.
Designed from the ground up for the computing architectures that will define games for the next decade, this release targets next-generation home consoles, mobile and PC while continuing to offer full support for current generation consoles.
"This release of Havok Physics marks the third major iteration of our physics technology since the company was founded 15 years ago. Although Havok Physics is widely recognized as the industry's leading physics solution, our R&D team is constantly striving to innovate and push the technology further," said Andrew Bond, Vice President of Technology for Havok. "The result is a new engine core built around fully continuous simulation that enables maximum physical fidelity with unprecedented performance speeds. Beta versions of the technology have been in the hands of a number of leading developers for some time and we have seen dramatic performance gains with simulations running twice as fast or more, and using up to 10 times less memory. Additionally the new core's performance is extremely predictable, eliminating performance spikes. We are genuinely excited to see how game designers will harness the additional power that we are offering with this release."
"At 2K Czech, our games demand a physics solution that can scale efficiently and handle highly detailed interactive environments. Having recently moved to the next generation of Havok Physics, we've been blown away by how Havok's new physics technology is able to make highly efficient utilization of all available hardware cores with a very lean runtime memory footprint," said Laurent Gorga, Technical Director at 2K Czech. "This combination allows us to deliver the high quality simulation at the scale we need and we are really looking forward to making some incredible games with the new technology."
Havok is currently scheduling meetings for technical reviews of its latest Physics technology at GDC March 27th- March 29th.
Designed from the ground up for the computing architectures that will define games for the next decade, this release targets next-generation home consoles, mobile and PC while continuing to offer full support for current generation consoles.
"This release of Havok Physics marks the third major iteration of our physics technology since the company was founded 15 years ago. Although Havok Physics is widely recognized as the industry's leading physics solution, our R&D team is constantly striving to innovate and push the technology further," said Andrew Bond, Vice President of Technology for Havok. "The result is a new engine core built around fully continuous simulation that enables maximum physical fidelity with unprecedented performance speeds. Beta versions of the technology have been in the hands of a number of leading developers for some time and we have seen dramatic performance gains with simulations running twice as fast or more, and using up to 10 times less memory. Additionally the new core's performance is extremely predictable, eliminating performance spikes. We are genuinely excited to see how game designers will harness the additional power that we are offering with this release."
"At 2K Czech, our games demand a physics solution that can scale efficiently and handle highly detailed interactive environments. Having recently moved to the next generation of Havok Physics, we've been blown away by how Havok's new physics technology is able to make highly efficient utilization of all available hardware cores with a very lean runtime memory footprint," said Laurent Gorga, Technical Director at 2K Czech. "This combination allows us to deliver the high quality simulation at the scale we need and we are really looking forward to making some incredible games with the new technology."
Havok is currently scheduling meetings for technical reviews of its latest Physics technology at GDC March 27th- March 29th.
46 Comments on Havok Launches Next Generation Physics Engine
I mean, new Haswell i5 models seem to be the same quad-core/quad-thread... VS... the "octa" FX-83xx models that are getting a bit of advantage on high core-dependent games...
Unless Intel plans to push gamers to buy the i7 models instead... getting people to upgrade to the lower i7's for an extra bit of cash.
This all depends on how much the developers will adopt it (and Haswell "horsepower"), but if they do, this seems a good opportunity for AMD... if they could get some lower TDP cpus out there, and if they could maintain and advantage on "multi-core" performance, they could finally have a very nice flag to wave out there and also force Intel to drop the lower i7 prices a bit in response.
Can't wait to see games start using this well... it's about time we got improved physics in games.
Anyway cool and about time Havok did something new :)
That said, we know different.
At the PS4 tech unveiling they showcased the age-old ball demo, which Havok declares on their site is not only used the most recent version of the SDK, but it was declared on-stage that it was running 'primarily on the GPU'.
Havok Physics Playstation 4 Demo - YouTube
At any rate...sweet. It only took 7 1/2 years for this to become (an announced) reality. Either way, finally...interactive physics (like tressfx) and not just swirling papers on the floor.
JINXS!!!
And Physics software engines that run on CPU cores, and compatible GPU architectures .
www.nvidia.com/content/GTC/documents/1077_GTC09.pdf
Third party proprietary software or running proprietary language.
CUDA /Physx (Nvidia)
Havok
Two common examples.
Open source Physics engines
TressFX (AMD using OpenCL)
Bullet Physics
Hardware = something you can put your hands on.
Software = binary code in high language forms that run on the hardware.
OpenCL = A standard for hardware to use/meet specifications of so that software written for it can use the hardware.
Physics engine = software that performs physical interaction computations on the CPU or GPU.
Closed Source = Proprietary software that only through licensing agreements can people or usually companies use, and mostly pay a licensing fee for the use of.
Open Source = Software and source code available for free to developers and end users alike without fees and the only agreement is usually listing the original source for the code.
I bet Havok could be used to simulate Lara's hair and also vegetation nearby if done right. All with CPU. Lara already had hair simulated in Legend and Underworld and they just overdone it in Tomb Raider 2013 yet it still looks poor if you ask me because vegetation 2m away wiggles around in a static manner, ruining the whole thing. Pointless. If EARTH 2150 game more than a decade ago could make factory smoke and snowstorm move in the same direction of the wind, surely they could do the same today. But no, like always, they overdo one thing and neglect other. Boring and stupid.
Good example is pathetic glass shattering in Mirror's Edge. I've seen CPU based games that had far superior glass shattering and they were released 10 years ago.
I also wonder why no one optimizes physics. Graphics are all one big faked effect where with physics, they always make scientific lab grade calculations. I bet you could loosen up the precision a bit and make it progressive based on distance from the viewportso it could make it look like it's real but it wouldn't really be realistic. Because right now they spend so much calculation power in single things it's ridiculous. AMD's TressFX for just hair alone and it brings the whole thing to its knees. WHY!? So the rest of these scene is static ugly crap? I'd much rather see hair that is semi realistic but there would also be vegetation that behaves realistically when you shoot it or walk through it. Instead it looks absolutely pathetic. But the hair is awesome. That's the most important thing. Not.
Hopefully with the next generation of consoles things will change. HOPEFULLY...
That is probably why right now there are far more games that use PhysX than Havok for physics, by a large margin too.
With this improved engine, hopefully it will be much better, I can see Havok taking over as the new standard. Seriously, developers will jump for this if it works like they claimed. Why would you choose a standard that shuts out half your potential customers.
The only thing that is going to make Havok become the new standard is if it can truly provide much better visuals than software PhysX, and that is yet to be seen in real world use. We'll have to wait for some new game to come out that actually use the new engine before we can say it is really a better solution than PhysX.