AMD's Physics Secret Revealed: Havok
Sunnyvale (CA) - AMD had to find an answer to Nvidia’s Ageia acquisition and the conversion of the PhysX engine into CUDA. We knew that AMD’s graphics team was up to something, since the manufacturer was highlighting "game physics processing capability" in its RV770 launch materials. Now we know, since AMD just announced a partnership with Havok. In case you are wondering: Yes, that is the same company that Intel acquired last year and now is a subsidiary of the blue team.
One month ago, we were fortunate enough to come across numerous launch details of the upcoming Radeon 4850 and 4870 graphics cards and the specific note of physics processing capability got us scratching our heads. Since Ageia was snapped up by Nvidia and the PhysX API is pretty much converted into CUDA on the one side and Intel secured Havok’s physics engine last September, we were wondering what AMD (ATI) was up to. They must have been developing their own physics engine along the way, right?
Wrong. In an announcement that we have to admit caught us a bit on the wrong foot, we learned today that this physics processing capability will come from Havok. AMD’s Godfrey Cheng, director of product marketing in the company’s platform and gaming technologies division, stressed today’s news does not include a product announcement, but simply points out that there is relationship being formed between AMD and Havok and the two companies are working together to "optimize" physics processing on AMD CPUs and AMD (ATI) GPUs.
So, why Havok? Cheng reasoned that Havok’s technology and toolset have been widely accepted by developers and are considered to be "very mature". He also noted that Havok follows AMD’s open approach philosophy. The executive indicated that Nvidia’s PhysX strategy does not match AMD’s strategy and that the company does not believe in forcing people to use a particular API. While Cheng said that AMD is aligned with Havok at this time, he did not want "exclude" a possible future announcement regarding PhysX. No such announcement is currently planned, we were told.
AMD said that Havok’s physics technology "scales extremely well across the entire family of AMD processors, including quad-core products such as the AMD Phenom X4." As part of the collaboration, Havok and AMD plan to "further optimize the full range of Havok technologies on AMD x86 superscalar processors." The two companies said that they are also "investigating" the use of "AMD’s massively parallel ATI Radeon GPUs to manage appropriate aspects of physical world simulation in the future."
While we are still a bit dazzled by the fact that AMD decided to go with an Intel-owned physics engine (and we are pretty sure that some people at Intel may be a bit surprised as well), Cheng stressed that Havok remains "independent" from Intel. Also, while we do not have any confirmation for this speculation, this relationship appears to be driven by the ATI team, which anyway has been working with Intel not just pre-AMD, but also recently on graphics products for Montevina (Centrino 2) notebooks as well as Crossfire X solutions. So this relationship may not be as awkward as it first sounds after all.
Now, of course, we are interested in seeing in what products this relationship will result.
Because like many other chip companies AMD have become complacent
,don't want to spend money on R&D oh and the other guys saw more than one foot ahead and bought the better companies before AMD.
sandmanwn I agree 100%. How can AMD Work with Havok when, Intel their future GPU competitor and current CPU chipset competitor owns Havok?
Wow maybe AMD should just bend over a table and get it over with.
For intel this is win win situation...
Now Nvidia is alone with PhysX technology... how much there is gonna be support for both systems? Not much I can predict. One game will support one, and other game another technology. If Havok wins Nvidia will lose... If PhysX wins AMD lose (and Havok)... If situation is bad, I can see that Intel will put money to get Havok support to the games, if it seem to be that AMD is losing, just to be sure that it has the rights of the "right" physic engine. That would help AMD to compete with Nvidia in game market.
The marketing policity is guite strange from time to time...
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I imagine games will support both. Otherwise you can guarantee the DOJ will get involved and nobody wants that.
How many games at this moment support both Havok and PhysX? None I think.
Havok is used in many games, PhysX is used in UT3 (I think) and in couple of other releases.
So I would say that we are "screwed" in that sence. Expect to see PhysX support in Nvidia as it was meant to play titles and Havok in most of the rest...
It will be interesting game engine war coming.
Nvidia had an agreement with Intel re: chipset access for Intel CPU's ... but not for Nehalem.
Intel want SLI ... Nvidia won't allow a cross license.
Intel cancel Nehalem access for Southbridge license to Nvidia.
Nvidia withdraw SLI.
AMD chose Havock rather than NVidia API support for physics.
Sounds like Nvidia are being forced out by both Intel (who want to develop graphics support ... which is a threat to Nvidia) and AMD who are a direct competitor to Bvidia.
Watch NVIDIA's stock prices plummet ... apart from discrete graphics they are now screwed.
They are now worthless because AMD and INTEL won't allow them to offer chipset support, and Intel would rather cross license Crossfire to ATI and share physics support with AMD than NVidia.
This is compounded by both companies seeing Nvidia license ARM technology and add graphics support to achieve Tegra. Albeit not X86 as such ... but close enough to scare them.
Intel and AMD will team up to destroy Nvidia in the process.
Nvidia should have cross licensed SLI to Intel some months ago ... it was their only hope.
As I said many times before their bibble is about to burst.
Stock might have been at a high of $36 a few months ago but it is now dropping to around $21 ... within 6 months it will be back to the $4 price it is really worth ... or was on 2003.
Goodbye Nvidia.
That's what happens when your CEO gets a swollen head and forgets his place in the bigger scheme of things.
AMD chipset, processor, graphics(ati), havok
Seems leading to standard... Both platforms support Havok and graphics.
i am excited to hear about this, I look forward to it.. being ive played both sides of the field. ATI vs nVidia, and AMD vs Intel.
both are great in their own right. but with diffrent API, i think is no good.
While it doesnt bode well for nVidia, i dont see this hurting them per say. They have too much of a following, and their cards are of great quality. I have never owned an ATi and never plan to.
All i think this will do is force nVidia to do something drastic, which has generally seemed to work relativly well in the past.
I already have the ageia card so i'm half way there right?
All they can do now is hope that people go spend alot of money on their new 8800GT on steroids, I'm sorry I mean the GTX 260 & GTX 280. And start forcing (or bribing) game developers to start using CUDA so they can try to get a jump start on the INTEL/AMD team.