Havoks new Physics Engine

Arkadrel

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2010
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I was reading a article on TechpowerUp about launch of a new havok engine, and I was thinking
"why does this article take up so little space, when its much more intresting than most of these other articles".

I didnt think it was getting its fair share of attention. I check other sites from time to time, and checked those and theres nothing even on them about it.

Basically they found a way for Havok to perform about 2-3x as fast as it currently does, while useing 1/10th the memory.

source: http://www.techpowerup.com/181341/Havok-Launches-Next-Generation-Physics-Engine.html



In the Techpowerup comments section I found this:

"At the PS4 tech unveiling they showcased the age-old ball demo, which Havok declares on their site is not only used the most recent version of the SDK, but it was declared on-stage that it was running 'primarily on the GPU'."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1hoVCZZOd0&feature=youtu.be

In this video we hear them say the Havok demo is running on the GPU, doing a million particle real-time physics simulation.



*IF* Havok really has a 2-3 times speed up on CPU, and theyve got it able to run the GPU as well now, does this mean we ll finally see PhysX get pushed out of the picture?
 

Face2Face

Diamond Member
Jun 6, 2001
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*IF* Havok really has a 2-3 times speed up on CPU, and theyve got it able to run the GPU as well now, does this mean we ll finally see PhysX get pushed out of the picture?

I will believe it when a million blue particles fall from the sky..
 

railven

Diamond Member
Mar 25, 2010
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*IF* Havok really has a 2-3 times speed up on CPU, and theyve got it able to run the GPU as well now, does this mean we ll finally see PhysX get pushed out of the picture?

Welps that's the wrong question to ask and pretty much is already going to steer this thread into the gutter.

How about:
IF* Havok really has 2-3 times speed up on CPU, and theyve got it able to run the GPU as well now, does this mean we ll finally see PhysX-like-functions on more hardware combinations?

Havok/PhysX/Newton - whom ever wants to make a fully functional feature that works on EVERY combination of hardware with no limitations outside of processing power of said hardware, bring it on!

I'd like to see someone create something that I can run on my AMD/nVidia/Intel GPU with the option to offload it to my APU/IGP. Now that is harmony!
 

Xarick

Golden Member
May 17, 2006
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It has been said several times that there is no benefit to running havok on the gpu. The CPU often has idle threads that can deal with the system. Physx could do the same, but then it wouldn't sell video cards.
 

BallaTheFeared

Diamond Member
Nov 15, 2010
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Except PhysX does the same, most the effects are run on the CPU. Only a few are run by the GPU.

The only interesting information that could come out of this is if Intel managed to run things typically run on the cpu (with PhysX as well) on the GPU, all gpu's at that.
 

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
21,938
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Nice to see more potential improvements with physics!

Nice to see potential universal GPU physics that will run on multiple different vendors GPUs (assuming they bother to develop it for NV GPUs, since it will be optimised for the AMD console GPUs first).
 

Wall Street

Senior member
Mar 28, 2012
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*IF* Havok really has a 2-3 times speed up on CPU, and theyve got it able to run the GPU as well now, does this mean we ll finally see PhysX get pushed out of the picture?

I doubt that Havok (a.k.a. Intel) has any interest in paying the TWIWMTBP money that nVidia pays to get games to adopt PhysX. Without TWIWMTBP, PhysX would have been long since forgotten. However, nVidia sees PhysX as an opportunity to differentiate their cards and the game studios see the sponsorship as a way to fund development costs even if their game misses sales targets.
 

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
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I doubt that Havok (a.k.a. Intel) has any interest in paying the TWIWMTBP money that nVidia pays to get games to adopt PhysX. Without TWIWMTBP, PhysX would have been long since forgotten. However, nVidia sees PhysX as an opportunity to differentiate their cards and the game studios see the sponsorship as a way to fund development costs even if their game misses sales targets.

If Havok develops GPU accelerated physics which works on the PS4 and Xbox 720, developers will probably want to use it anyway, since then they have the choice of how to do things.
Developers love choice, makes it much easier, like having a pool of RAM they can share between CPU and GPU rather than discrete amounts.

The choice of sharing RAM, choosing what runs the physics, all good for the console world.
PCs are irrelevant to the GPU accelerated physics market, all that matters is who or what runs on consoles/the AMD GPUs in them. That will decide the future of GPU physics.
 

KingFatty

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2010
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Havok is used in Starcraft 2.

Any word whether any updates to Havok made it into the recently released updated to Starcraft 2, Heart of the Swarm?

It would be nice to ease the CPU burden that Starcraft 2 imposes, and I think havok has been part of the reason why it's a little hard on the CPU overall?
 

VulgarDisplay

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2009
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Do Havok physics look as good as NVidia's PhysX?

Who can say with the new implementation. I can say that PhysX has never really been impressive enough to make it a must have feature. That's more due to the fact that it can't effect gameplay or developers wouldn't be able to use it. It's just useless clutter at this stage, but that could be changing.
 

BallaTheFeared

Diamond Member
Nov 15, 2010
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PhysX is an actual physics engine, with graphical enhancements >.<

Hopefully Havok will be gpu accelerated and in a lot of titles!
 

Dribble

Platinum Member
Aug 9, 2005
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/me looks for some proof that new havok is better - like for example a video showing what it can do?

Nothing ... so far it's just marketing blah.
 

KingFatty

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2010
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Hmm, I think it's interesting whether one physics engine could even be thought of as being better than another?

It seems to me like it's an engine, so you can build whatever you want in either one? I suppose you could get into efficiency and which would run at a faster frames per second on a given computer, but I wonder if you could build the same effects in any of the major physics engines?
 

Olikan

Platinum Member
Sep 23, 2011
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Hmm, I think it's interesting whether one physics engine could even be thought of as being better than another?

It seems to me like it's an engine, so you can build whatever you want in either one? I suppose you could get into efficiency and which would run at a faster frames per second on a given computer, but I wonder if you could build the same effects in any of the major physics engines?

there is few minor diferences...
havok only uses the CPU, while bullet and physX can use the GPU aswell...

this makes havok to struggle when dealing with multiple particles, and with multiple particles i mean, more than 50K particles bouncing around...

other than this insane number, only used for benchmarks and PR, physics engines is just a matter of theyr developers talent, will or budget
 
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PrincessFrosty

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Feb 13, 2008
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www.frostyhacks.blogspot.com
I'd be interesting in knowing the properties of the physics running on the GPU, do they have the same failings as PhysX in that classic game logic running on the CPU is slow to query the state of the physics simulation?

The classic problem with large scale GPU physics is that it doesn't integrate well with the actual world, PhysX on the GPU has always traditionally been just to make the scene pretty not actually make it more functional...for example a high resolution cloth being calculated in real time looks nice, but won't block the line of sight for AI bots for example...

If Havok can get meaningful large scale physics on the GPU then great, but I'm not convinced, I think that's more of an architecture problem than anything else. Meanwhile the CPU is left largely unused today in gaming and could be running a lot more complex physics than it currently is. Sigh.
 

Arkadrel

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2010
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there is few minor diferences...
havok only uses the CPU, while bullet and physX can use the GPU aswell...

this makes havok to struggle when dealing with multiple particles, and with multiple particles i mean, more than 50K particles bouncing around...

other than this insane number, only used for benchmarks and PR, physics engines is just a matter of theyr developers talent, will or budget


1) Havok doesnt only use the CPU now. Watch the PS4 video on havok.
The guy presenting the demo mentions its running mainly on the GPU
(useing only a fraction of its GPU power)

2) "struggles when dealing with" "more than 50k particles"

The video shows 1,000,000 particles bounceing around, on Havok.
1million particles is 20 times more than 50k.

Also the video looks super smooth, and they mention its a "fraction" of
the GPU thats used only. So they can probably do much higher numbers
if they wanted too.


other than this insane number, only used for benchmarks and PR, physics engines is just a matter of theyr developers talent, will or budget

^ fully agree on this. I think its just too many lazy developers out there.



The classic problem with large scale GPU physics is that it doesn't integrate well with the actual world, PhysX on the GPU has always traditionally been just to make the scene pretty not actually make it more functional...for example a high resolution cloth being calculated in real time looks nice, but won't block the line of sight for AI bots for example...
If they can figour out how to do shadow's for each individual strand of hair, with something like TressFX, they should be able to do the same with Objects and AI's.

I dont think its limited to havok, or PhysX. Ultimately it comes down to the programmers, I think its a matter of how much time they want to devote to the game, and how much resources makeing AIs work that way would cost in terms of performance. I dont think its a technical barrier, but more a work vs reward sort of thing.
 
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Olikan

Platinum Member
Sep 23, 2011
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good to know that havok uses gpus aswell....well, the 50k number is a bit randon :D
 

sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
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Havok is only using the CPU until Intel will publish a statement that they official support GPUs.
 

moonbogg

Lifer
Jan 8, 2011
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Does this mean we'll have tornados in BF4? That would be cool to be driving a jeep and then all of a sudden you're flying next to Dorothy and Toto.
 

hmcindie

Junior Member
Nov 26, 2012
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2) "struggles when dealing with" "more than 50k particles"

The video shows 1,000,000 particles bounceing around, on Havok.
1million particles is 20 times more than 50k.

Depends on what the particles are doing. Particle work for film vfx does take A LOT of muscle.

This has 44 million particles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFATFPfhn08

This only one mill but with Realflow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7AKrMmaXSg

None of those realtime. Not even close. Havok (or any other game physic engines) cut corners to get the speed up. Sometimes you won't notice it. But a lot of game physics are very, very, very simple. You can get the complexity up but then it will get bogged down.