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 Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 16:06 Post subject: Havok Unveils Next-Generation Physics Engine |
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http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Havok-GDC-Physics-Engine,21497.html
| Quote: | | According to Andew Bond, Vice President of Technology for Havok, this version has resulted in a "new engine core built around fully continuous simulation that enables maximum physical fidelity with unprecedented performance speeds. Beta versions of the technology have been in the hands of a number of leading developers for some time and we have seen dramatic performance gains with simulations running twice as fast or more, and using up to 10 times less memory. Additionally the new core’s performance is extremely predictable, eliminating performance spikes.” |
| Quote: | | Further information about this version of the Havok Physics engine is expected to be revealed at this year's GDC, held between March 27 and March 29 in San Francisco, California. |
I hope it can do stuff similar to PhysX, anyway we are probably gonna see some physics action at GDC.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 16:13 Post subject: |
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I have always found HAVOK's physics to be much superior to nVidia's, without taking a huge performance hit. Hope they continue their work in a similar manner.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 16:17 Post subject: |
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| Shawn_Hunter wrote: | | I have always found HAVOK's physics to be much superior to nVidia's, without taking a huge performance hit. Hope they continue their work in a similar manner. |
havok performs well when its used for minor stuff. otherwise you get red faction guerilla which raped CPU's at time of release.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 16:33 Post subject: |
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Maybe related. Valve will be at GDC to talk about physics.
It's quite possible Havok's talk and a Source 2 physics unveal by Valve will align.
Because I don't think Valve will talk about physics in CS:GO/Dota2.. and these were their most recent games.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 16:36 Post subject: |
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Cool. Gonna run like shit though since it's all gonna be done on the CPU.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 16:53 Post subject: |
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| nnyxx wrote: | | Cool. Gonna run like shit though since it's all gonna be done on the CPU. |
Yes if its ran on ancient crappy dual core.
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sausje
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:20 Post subject: |
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| Breezer_ wrote: | | nnyxx wrote: | | Cool. Gonna run like shit though since it's all gonna be done on the CPU. |
Yes if its ran on ancient crappy dual core. |
Indeed, AFAIK, a CPU can do such calculations much better then the GPU can.
Proud member of Frustrated Association of International Losers Failing Against the Gifted and Superior (F.A.I.L.F.A.G.S)
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:32 Post subject: |
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Well, despite bashing PhysX being a popular pastime, I have never seen any CPU implementation do the same.
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sausje
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:36 Post subject: |
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| Divvy wrote: | | Well, despite bashing PhysX being a popular pastime, I have never seen any CPU implementation do the same. |
Do what exactly the same? Name the effects, because most of the important ones can be done on Havok aswell.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:37 Post subject: |
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| Divvy wrote: | | Well, despite bashing PhysX being a popular pastime, I have never seen any CPU implementation do the same. |
because havok doesnt do real physics, and why people started to care about it now?
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sausje
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:39 Post subject: |
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| Smikis. wrote: | | Divvy wrote: | | Well, despite bashing PhysX being a popular pastime, I have never seen any CPU implementation do the same. |
because havok doesnt do real physics, and why people started to care about it now? |
What are real physics then in your eyes?
Proud member of Frustrated Association of International Losers Failing Against the Gifted and Superior (F.A.I.L.F.A.G.S)
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:43 Post subject: |
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| sausje wrote: | | Divvy wrote: | | Well, despite bashing PhysX being a popular pastime, I have never seen any CPU implementation do the same. |
Do what exactly the same? Name the effects, because most of the important ones can be done on Havok aswell. |
The most important ones are Collision Detection and Ragdolls, both of which PhysX does at less of a performance cost, and which if needed, can be offloaded onto a seperate set of dedicated processing cores on the GPU and for a cheaper price to developers. Havok does not. PhysX also supports particle physics calculations offloaded onto a seperate dedicated set of cores on the GPU. Havok does not.
| Breezer_ wrote: | | nnyxx wrote: | | Cool. Gonna run like shit though since it's all gonna be done on the CPU. |
Yes if its ran on ancient crappy dual core. |
Ummm what? No, if they are going to put even more physics calculations in it such as, say, Particle Physics, it could still bring your quad core CPU to it's knees. Your CPU isn't going to be dedicated to those Physics, it's going to be sharing the load with the OS, background applications, the game, the physics, and certain parts of rendering on the CPU.
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sausje
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:48 Post subject: |
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| nnyxx wrote: | | The most important ones are Collision Detection and Ragdolls, both of which PhysX does at less of a performance cost, and which if needed, can be offloaded onto a seperate set of dedicated processing cores on the GPU and for a cheaper price to developers. Havok does not. PhysX also supports particle physics calculations offloaded onto a seperate dedicated set of cores on the GPU. Havok does not. |
Got any non biased documentation for this?
Plus you say dedicated, but how come that performance drops ingame and for some even a dedicated card is needed if they really use dedicated cores for that? Using dedicated cores means that it should have no impact on the framerate at all when running on the same card..
Havok supports everything you mentioned, and all being done on the CPU without limiting a user to a certain brand 
Proud member of Frustrated Association of International Losers Failing Against the Gifted and Superior (F.A.I.L.F.A.G.S)
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 18:50 Post subject: |
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How you can say now how efficient the new Havok will be?
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ixigia
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:40 Post subject: |
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I've always considered Havok superior to GimmicX myself, if they manage to eliminate those spikes and improve the performance it will be great step. 
Oh, and more proper physics in games please! One of the many things that I despise in modern gaming is the staticity of the environments, with barely no interactions whatsoever.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:44 Post subject: |
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I always loved Havok, so I'm glad to see they're planning to take it to the next level. It handles everything in a more believable way than PhysX and that at a much lower cost performance wise.
Also, what consolitis said might be true. Wasn't HL2 one of the first (or first?) titles to use Havok?
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:50 Post subject: |
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I can only think of two games where physx was actually really cool.
First is Alice Madness Returns. With physx on that game was fucking insane. Shit flying around everywhere. At release people bashed it as yet another gimmick.. But I can tell you that it really added to that game.
Second is PS2. Again, with physx on the particle effects from explosions and other things really adds visually.
Using something like Havok you wouldn't be able to do that without a massive performance drop.
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sausje
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:54 Post subject: |
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| DarkRohirrim wrote: | | Also, what consolitis said might be true. Wasn't HL2 one of the first (or first?) titles to use Havok? |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havok_(software)#Havok_in_video_games
London Racer it seems.
But HL2 did use a heavy modified, so it might be the first in it's kind to do the stuff that you saw in HL2
| Quote: | | For Half-Life 2, Valve Corporation developed a new game engine called the Source engine, which handles the game's visual, audio, and artificial intelligence elements. The Source engine comes packaged with a heavily modified version of the Havok physics engine that allows for an extra dimension of interactivity in both single-player and online environments |
| Mchart wrote: | | Using something like Havok you wouldn't be able to do that without a massive performance drop. |
How do you know that? Since proper particle physics is only recently in the latest version of Havok, yet to be used in any game..
So you can't know at all, for a fact, that it uses more or less recourses then physx 
Proud member of Frustrated Association of International Losers Failing Against the Gifted and Superior (F.A.I.L.F.A.G.S)
Last edited by sausje on Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:55; edited 1 time in total |
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:55 Post subject: |
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First big AAA title I remember using Havok was Max Payne 2. Can't beleive no one remembers that. People were raving about shit flying around everywhere.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:58 Post subject: |
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| sausje wrote: | | DarkRohirrim wrote: | | Also, what consolitis said might be true. Wasn't HL2 one of the first (or first?) titles to use Havok? |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havok_(software)#Havok_in_video_games
London Racer it seems.
But HL2 did use a heavy modified, so it might be the first in it's kind to do the stuff that you saw in HL2
| Quote: | | For Half-Life 2, Valve Corporation developed a new game engine called the Source engine, which handles the game's visual, audio, and artificial intelligence elements. The Source engine comes packaged with a heavily modified version of the Havok physics engine that allows for an extra dimension of interactivity in both single-player and online environments |
| Mchart wrote: | | Using something like Havok you wouldn't be able to do that without a massive performance drop. |
How do you know that? Since proper particle physics is only recently in the latest version of Havok, yet to be used in any game..
So you can't know at all, for a fact, that it uses more or less recourses then physx |
It has to do with the fact that GPU's are able to deal with physics calculations then a typical x86 CPU is. This has to do with the huge number of limited instruction 'CPU's' in each GPU. Same reason certain other computing tasks perform better on a GPU, then even a 16-core CPU. A new version of Havok won't change that unless Havok will be the first major physics engine using Direct Compute.
Last edited by Mchart on Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:59; edited 1 time in total
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 19:59 Post subject: |
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I'm not sure what you guys see in Havok's physics. Excluding the Red Faction games which mixed it up with their own tech what exactly did Havok do or did better?
HL2 today is not impressive in terms of physics. Such bog standard stuff are being done well on all physics engines and on all platforms, eg Trine uses PhysX.
If we are talking about such basic physics any solution will do.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
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sausje
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 20:01 Post subject: |
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| Mchart wrote: | | It has to do with the fact that GPU's are able to deal with physics calculations then a typical x86 CPU is. This has to do with the huge number of limited instruction 'CPU's' in each GPU. Same reason certain other computing tasks perform better on a GPU, then even a 16-core CPU. A new version of Havok won't change that unless Havok will be the first major physics engine using Direct Compute. |
Well i have no knowledge about what a CPU and GPU can and can't do specificly, but i highly doubt that a GPU has more processing power then a CPU..
Proud member of Frustrated Association of International Losers Failing Against the Gifted and Superior (F.A.I.L.F.A.G.S)
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Werelds
Special Little Man
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 20:01 Post subject: |
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Holy shit at all the bullshit on this page, suppose I should've expected it 
Picking out a few bits below, but the TL;DR is that much of the above is plain wrong and PhysX is inferior to Havok in many ways. PhysX needs to die a quick death so all gamers, regardless of GPU and platform can get the physics Havok has been capable of for ages.
| Breezer_ wrote: | | I hope it can do stuff similar to PhysX |
It already can and has been able to for a year or 2-3.
| sausje wrote: | | Indeed, AFAIK, a CPU can do such calculations much better then the GPU can. |
No. Large calculations, yes. But when it comes to physics, most of it are very small, very simple calculations - there's just an aweful lot of them. So, execute them in parallel and you get a huge bump in speed and that's exactly what GPUs can do. The problem lies in the fact that the current GPGPU APIs can't support some things that are necessary.
| Drowning_witch wrote: | | havok performs well when its used for minor stuff. otherwise you get red faction guerilla which raped CPU's at time of release. |
| Divvy wrote: | | Well, despite bashing PhysX being a popular pastime, I have never seen any CPU implementation do the same. |
| Smikis. wrote: | | because havok doesnt do real physics, and why people started to care about it now? |
| nnyxx wrote: | | The most important ones are Collision Detection and Ragdolls, both of which PhysX does at less of a performance cost, and which if needed, can be offloaded onto a seperate set of dedicated processing cores on the GPU and for a cheaper price to developers. Havok does not. PhysX also supports particle physics calculations offloaded onto a seperate dedicated set of cores on the GPU. Havok does not. |
#1: PhysX is not fully GPU powered - in fact, most of it is not. So that invalidates half of what nnyxx says already. What runs on the GPU are fluids, cloth and soft body and with APEX 1.2, rigid body as well.
#2: Havok is not real physics? Havok can't do rigid body collision and/or ragdolls?
First of all, Havok is behind most of the rigid body collision and ragdolls you see in games.
Second of all, PhysX' implementation of both runs on the CPU just like with Havok and it runs worse pre-3.0 because it doesn't even use SSE instructions before that. With 2.8.3 or APEX 1.2 it can run rigid body on the GPU, but to my knowledge the only game that's done that is Batman: AC.
Third: There is no game that uses PhysX 3.0+ yet, which is the only version that compares to Havok performance-wise. The only thing PhysX does substantially better are particles and they are used in all the wrong ways whenever Nvidia drops their bag of money. Point in question: Mafia 2, which becomes a cartoon with PhysX turned on.
Fact is that Havok is behind most games, even if it's not advertised as blatently as Nvidia wants it with PhysX. It's that simple.
I'm just gonna link to some of my own posts in the Next-Gen thread because I can't be fucked to go through it all again.
http://www.nfohump.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2136892#2136892
http://www.nfohump.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2137364#2137364
http://www.nfohump.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2137428#2137428
http://www.nfohump.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2137537#2137537
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 20:03 Post subject: |
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Which is all fine and dandy, but there simply aren't any games around that implemented Havok that look anywhere near as awesome as Alice, PS2, or even the batman's did. In the end it's about actual real world implementation, not 'what if'.
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sausje
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 20:04 Post subject: |
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| Werelds wrote: | | No. Large calculations, yes. But when it comes to physics, most of it are very small, very simple calculations - there's just an aweful lot of them. So, execute them in parallel and you get a huge bump in speed and that's exactly what GPUs can do. The problem lies in the fact that the current GPGPU APIs can't support some things that are necessary. |
So a GPU will always be better at physics calculations then a CPU if implemented properly?
Or am i understanding that totally wrong now?
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Werelds
Special Little Man
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 20:10 Post subject: |
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| Mchart wrote: | | Which is all fine and dandy, but there simply aren't any games around that implemented Havok that look anywhere near as awesome as Alice, PS2, or even the batman's did. In the end it's about actual real world implementation, not 'what if'. |
Allow me:
| Me wrote: | The only thing PhysX does that you have not seen in other engines/games are probably the fluid simulations. Cloth has been done with Havok plenty of times (MK + HR to name two console games). Ragdolls were around long before PhysX and I don't think any serious big title uses PhysX for them, all Havok. A LOT of games use Havok for their ragdolls and just animations in general; Alan Wake for example is almost all Havok. Particles have also been done before, volumetric fog for in PhysX doesn't work for shit anyway
Meanwhile, Havok has been used for things which PhysX is too slow for. Source engine? All Havok. Frostbite (2.0 as well)? Havok. Red Faction: Guerrilla? Skyrim? Darksiders? Bioshock? Timeshift? All three Uncharted games? All Havok, including ragdolls and such where applicable.
Again, just because you don't get a big Havok logo thrown in your face doesn't mean it isn't there :/ |
Particle spam only works in a game such as Alice. Batman's use of PhysX is all horseshit apart from the cloth stuff, which like I said, Havok can do with the same performance and without being locked to Nvidia.
Fact is that Havok HAS BEEN USED plenty - more so than PhysX in fact and I want to see more physics like RF:Guerrilla (with improved performance of course) much more so than useless particles. And that is exactly where Havok always has been faster than PhysX, RF:G on PhysX would have been twice as bad performance-wise.
| sausje wrote: | So a GPU will always be better at physics calculations then a CPU if implemented properly?
Or am i understanding that totally wrong now? |
No, for some tasks a GPU will be better, for some a CPU. Generally, the more complex a calculation, the more the balance shifts towards the CPU.
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sanchin
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 20:14 Post subject: |
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There's no way a CPU could run physics better than a GPU. The computations are not that demanding at all, but the sheer number of particles / shit that has to be calculated is the reason why CPUs suck at it - GPUs can fire many more simultaneous "threads" counting the same thing for different data.
Few years ago as a project for my studies I've written something that run either on CPU or GPU and was about calculating trajectories of thousands of objects and trying not to collide with each other. The CPU could calculate 4 at once (4 cores), while my GPU could...240. And the time for each was not that different, and even if it was - the CPU would have to be more than 60 times faster than the GPU to perform better.
So the only way for Havoc is to go GPGPU way - be it DirectCompute, OpenCL or CUDA, with the last one being least probable because of NVIDIA-only.
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| Posted: Sat, 16th Mar 2013 20:14 Post subject: |
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Ok? And again, none of those games you bolded besides Guerrilla and of course source engine games were memorable for their physics. Source only because it was the first to really implement *any* sort of physics so heavily into gameplay. Guerrilla because you could destroy entire buildings. Guerrilla had huge performance issues on even high-end CPU's though.
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