Havok Physics

[Neil]

I'm currently running an AMD 3870X2. Is it true that this GPU has on-board Physics support? Is it Havok? Do I need a separate driver to use it?

Neil

[Likay]

Also a bit curious. Isn't physics included in directx10? That those unishaderunits handles not only vertex, pixels. or whatever-shaders but also act as physicshaders if necessary?. Heard the same about my nv8800 so this doesn't seem to be ati exclusive though. Wants to hear from someone with more knowledge though.

cheers

[LukePC1]

The unified shaders can handle the old shaders (Vertex and pixel-Shaders). The new thing are Geometry shaders.
With DX 9 cards they have special pipelines to calculate each type.
The new unified shaders have all 3 types together, to get a more effective load (less idle units).

I made some research on Physics on this GPU, but it seems to be not specially supported right now. However I found Information (in German) that Intel and AMD are teaming up to have better support for the Havok engine (which is developed by Intel). NV bought PhyicX, so they are a potential concurent.

http://www.golem.de/0806/60340.html

So it's only planned to have the GPU's make the work...

Ok had some more research and found this:

Nevertheless, there is no reason to doubt that the X2 actually has over 1 TeraFLOP of GPU compute power, considering G80-based cards from NVIDIA in multi-GPU configurations can do pretty much the same thing (and actually do something in Tesla form). On the official specifications sheet, AMD also lists “Game physics processing capability” as a feature for the X2.

This so-called GPU-based physics topic is getting pretty old at this point. Both companies have touted the physics processing capabilities of their GPUs for more than two years by now, and so far nobody has seen any real-world implementation of the technology. Talk is cheap, and while AMD and NVIDIA are listing these features without showing us the goods, AGEIA is left to completely dominate the physics hardware market.

http://www.fpslabs.com/reviews/video/am ... -x2-review
search for physics in the article...
It's from january, so it should be at least a little valid. And you'd hear if there were some new games with high-End physics, right?

Most CPU's can run the physics pretty good. I tried it with this Demo Game for the aiga physiX card. It worked ok in S-3D and there were a lot of boxes flying around
But i'm not shure, if I had all effects on...

[cybereality]

I'm pretty sure the current generation of cards support physics but the actual implementation isn't there. To be honest, I think its a lot of hype. If either company (ATI/NV) had a physics demo that could beat a hardware PhysX card, why haven't they shown anything? I keep hearing this talk for years, I've not seen one single demo that proves anything. If you ask me, it was just a bunch of propaganda so people wouldn't buy into PhysX cards. I think ATI has been talking about this Havok-FX chip for years, but again, where is the proof? I'll believe it when I see it.

[Likay]

Thanks for enlightening me. I do think we haven't seen the full potential of directx10 yet and i don't think programmers know exactly how to make the protocols yet either. o.O. Time will show i guess. So far there's not much difference in dx9 or 10 but i might have wrong in some single case. Maybe that's because our machines yet are too weak for it as is today.

cheers

[lamanuwa]

Hey I'm new. But I know a bit about this. Yes the Radeon HD3870X2 supports hardware accelerated physics.
No. Direct X 10 does not include any of the two major physics libraries, being Havok Physics and nVidia Physx.
nVidia Physx differs from Havok, by being proprietary to nVidia's chips. This is why games with Havok Physics are seen both on the Xbox 360 and PS3, where as nVidia Physx appeared only on PS3.

Physics as an entity, is a set of assembled programming libraries that define game world virtual dynamics. These are employed in game using CUDA and OpenCL respectively by nVidia and AMD. The reason Havok Physics also works on nVidia is because, nVidia GPUs can also handle OpenCL apart from CUDA. As long as Havok wishes to stay independant, AMD cannot really advertise physics, but the hardware is completely capable.