AMD, Havok to Team Up for Gaming Physics

Since NVIDIA acquired AGEIA in February, people have wondered what AMD was going to do in response. After all, with Intel acquiring Havok last year, what was there left? Perhaps AMD would come up with their own physics solution. After all its RV770 launch materials mentioned processing capability.

Nope. AMD announced a partnership with Havok. In the press release, Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD said:

As the complexity and visual fidelity of video games increases, AMD wants to take advantage of opportunities to improve the game experience. 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.


And, David O’Meara, managing director of Havok said:

The success of Havok as a cross platform software company is predicated on our willingness to listen to the needs of our customers. 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.

There was no product announcement involved, and this release doesn't indicate exclusivity, so AMD could choose to support AGEIA as well, if it wanted. That would likely be a smart move.

The Intel angle makes this interesting, so we'll keep tracking it.

Havok recently released a "free for non-commercial use" version of their product