AMD unveilled today its plans to work with Intel-owned physics
processing developer Havok in order to add physics effects at
AMD's full line of products.
"As the complexity and visual fidelity of video games
increases, AMD wants to take advantage of opportunities to
improve the game experience," said Rick Bergman, senior vice
president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD.
"By working with the clear market leader in physics software,
AMD can optimize our platforms to consistently deliver the best
possible visual experience to the gamer."
AMD's answer to
Nvidia's Ageia acquisition last February was
expected but also surpsiring, since Havok is 100% owned by
AMD's rival Intel.
Amd said that Havok Physics 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 will also investigate the use of AMD's parallel ATI
Radeon GPUs to manage appropriate aspects of physical world
simulation in the future.
"The success of Havok as a cross platform software company is
predicated on our willingness to listen to the needs of our
customers," said David O'Meara, managing director of Havok.
"The feedback that we consistently receive from leading game
developers is that core game play simulation should be
performed on CPU cores. The clear priority of game developers
is performance and scalability on of the CPU. Beyond core
simulation, however, the capabilities of massively parallel
products offer technical possibilities for computing certain
types of simulation. We look forward to working with AMD to
explore these possibilities."
Today's game experience demands a balanced platform approach,
one that combines the right CPU and GPU horsepower. A number of
game aspects, including advanced physics processing, are
optimized for CPUs, while the latest DirectX 10.1 games demand
the latest GPUs.
"Physics is an important part of today's game experience, and
in the quest for greater realism the usage and requirements of
physics computation is expected to increase, " said Dean
McCarron, principal analyst, Mercury Research. "New technologies
that improve physics simulation will enhance the gaming
experience."