Havok 4.0 is a gathering of developing tools that can be used by digital artists in the movie and game industry to create physical effects and graphics. Havok has continued and further developed its Havok Physics and Havok Animation tools, which are used to create and handle physcial effects in games and animations. Except from these two tools it has also introduced two new products with Havok 4.0, namely Havok Behavior and Havok FX. The first is suppose to offer better possibilities to create physics dependent interactive characters that will increase the sense of reality in games. Havok FX is the last piece of the puzzle with Havok’s SDK and it i this tool that ATI and NVIDIA uses to accelerate physical effects with its graphics circuits.
“Havok FX™ adds an unprecedented level of hardware-accelerated physical phenomena, by utilizing graphics processing (GPU) technology from industry giants like NVIDIA and ATI to simulate tens of thousands of objects that collide in real-time, to add eye-popping effects to games.”
It’s going to be interesting to see how Havok’s solution works with ATI and NVIDIA’s graphics circuits compared to AGEIA’s external and specialized physics solution PhysX. The first games with Havok 4.0 support will appear during fall/winter of 2006 so now it’s up to the graphics card manufacturers to keep up.
