Intel recently acquired physics and game effects company Havoc, which together with AGEIA and its PhysX platform, have been two of the leading actors for advanced physical effects in games. As Intel is now an indirect actor on the physics market, AMD has to do something about this and seems to have discussed quite a few scenarios. Richard Huddy of the AMD marketing department, recently pointed out that using GPUs for physics is a dead concepts (surprise, surprise…). Simply because there are no advanced development tools for making GPU-accelerated physical effects.
He continues by saying that companies should instead focus on using multi-core processors, which have a lot of unused capacity today.
“Therefore, for AMD, which is the second largest provider of x86 central processing units (CPUs) in the world, it makes more sense now to promote physics calculations on its multi-core processors, granted that there are special development tools offered. As a consequence, without Havok FX and with no substantial intention to support it by AMD, GPU physics is unlikely to become popular in the short term future.”
He also reveals that AMD has discussed buying AGEIA, Havoc’s greatest competition. Huddy claims that the discussion have never been really nothing but brain storming, and points out that it would probably be a very expensive deal, because of Intel’s recent acquisition of Havoc.
“In a bizarre twist of events, it looks as though Intel’s purchase of Havok could have actually put Havok’s competitor, Ageia, in a better position. As Huddy says, ‘if I was predicting [previously] I would say that they [Ageia] would probably grind themselves out of business in a year or so, but now they have an opportunity to sell themselves for a lot of money instead, I suspect.’
At the moment, AMD is not interested in purchasing AGEIA, but it hasn’t ruled out the possibility.
