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
On this new engine from Havok (that's my actual nickname for a long time in the internet media hehe) I hope we see lots of game devs that adopt this VS nvidia proprietary physx (I own one but i prefer an outsider company to provide for both camps) and get us some nice perfomance driven, high detail physx (see Mafia II from 2k, quite poorly optimized).
Shooting at cloth flags and having particles fly = Fail.
Liquid effects were good but ran on low ?
PhysX set to low were extremely basic like anything else but High it was exagerated.
The game engine/physics has to be combine more then it is now to take advange of elements.
I am aware of what has been possible , im just optimistic for what could be possible ..
You don't know any more than I do about this new havok and yet nay say away ? It Might be good ya neva knooooo.
Ill just go sit in a corner dreaming, give me a shout when you're nvidia overlords have cracked it in ten years with the ps5 then eh ta.
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Basically how I see Physx vs Havok.
I would prefer the scripted environment damage of BF3 over the extremely limited re-active physx on offer so far.
In Crysis 3, this time running under 2 7970's, I was amazed by the water reflections and the way the light flowed across the walls of areas coinciding with the movement of objects in the water.
Havok is in the same boat in that it needs to be used globally in game to make it useful.
In game physics is all too often used by people to attack Nvidia for keeping it proprietary or attacking AMD for not having a suitable alternative. Point is - it's all nothing more than window dressing until the games adopt a more universal immersion.
Once again it's down to developers to make the effort and for AMD/Nvidia to build upon that to code for all of us.
If you need an explanation I already went over this several posts up, try reading the thread.
I want good physics that is part of the game instead of dressing on the game. If i blow up the tank, the tracks better fly off and decapitate my head instead of looking like the tracks flew off and goes right past me.
Physics in game is pretty pathetic right now and we want more. That is all.
From the small clip it looks like Havok will be able to accelerate with out dicriminating on GPU. We'll find out more by the end of the month since they have 2 boths planned at GDC.
If thats the case its a nice step forward.