San Francisco (CA) – If you are a frequent reader of TG Daily, this should not be entirely news to you, but it is now official. AMD has shown its idea of physics effects at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, based on Havok’s physics middleware.
The demonstrations included what the company claims was the first OpenCL supported execution of Havok Cloth, wrapped into the company’s ATI Stream technology. This particular demonstration tries to realistically display a real-time cloth simulation.
OpenCL is the first cross-platform and open technology designed to exploit the horsepower in graphics processors for general purpose applications. Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard Mac OS X operating system is believed to become one of the first major applications to showcase this technology later this year.
Interestingly, when AMD announced its collaboration with Havok (which is owned by Intel), it said that it would focus on physics processing via multi-core CPUs. But what we see now is that Havok physics is enabled via the GPU, even if AMD claims that the CPU helps out occasionally in OpenCL operations.
Both Nvidia’s and AMD (ATI) said they will support OpenCL. Of course, now we would like to see some real-world software and not just demonstrations.
