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Jeff Yates gets technical about next-gen consoles and PhysX PCs

Posted Apr 16, 2007 at 1:41PM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: PS3, Xbox 360, PC Gaming Tags: Ageia, Gamasutra, Havok, PC Gamer, PhysX, playstation 3 updates, SDK

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As director of product management at Havok, Jeff Yates explained the intricate details of the Havok physics simulation tool that they delivered to titles such as Half-Life 2, Dead Rising, and MotorStorm, including the insight of how the gears turn for the technical side of the game industry.

For two and a half years, Havok has been developing software development kits for use in physics engine and animation development in games. With the official launching of the SDK back in mid-2004, they've had seen a lot of progress with their animation and physics features as the years rolled by.

So it wouldn't be surprising that in an exclusive interview with game dev's haven Gamasutra, Yates got a little bit technical about next-gen console technology and competition against PhysX">AGEIA's PhysX hardware physics accelerator for the titan PC.

Havok, as you must know, delivers software solutions to physics simulation, which is something that next-gen consoles require as of this moment. Many other game developers license the use of the physics SDK to simulate real in-game physics in the most complex and hardware hungry of titles (Half-Life 2 for example).

Software physics is handled by the CPU and its cores, although new solutions have GPUs taking the processing load off the CPU. Havok delivers their physics engine solutions as customers require of them, often catering to the different hardware slapped into the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. After all, they've built their solutions with cross-platform features and consoles in mind.

And with Havok's dealings with both sides of the fence, they've seen developers keep focused on a specific architecture time and time again. The problem with this, as Yates claimed, is that once a title gets completed, the developers shy away from having to recode the game to cater to the other platform.

For example, most devs start out checking the Xbox 360's SKU, without stopping to think twice about catering to the power of the PlayStation 3 and creating a compatibility leeway for that. Supporting their own stand on cross-platform abilities, Yates stated:

We try to advise people that if they're thinking about moving to PS3 eventually, that they need to talk to us at the start so we can get things sorted out. I think that's going to be a very big challenge for everybody for awhile, because this idea of many, many cores with smaller local memories will present a lot of challenges in many different directions.

In effect, a game that looked great on the Xbox 360 usually had a problem looking just as great on a PlayStation 3. The sheer power of the STI's PowerPC CELL BE is something to contend with, and Yates believe that the hardship faced is only face-deep: developers just have to know how to create a game to take advantage of seven cores, just as the PC industry has to contend with developing multi-core games.

In the PC side, however, the enthusiast PC gamer has the option to pick up the computing cycle used on physics simulation and drop it to a dedicated hardware solution, such as AGEIA's PhysX card.

Usually available on the most extreme of PCs, some black market geeks have been able to pimp their Banzai Runners with the physics processing unit (PPU) addon card. It's priced as high as a mid-range graphics card, but currently lacks enough support for most games.

Havok isn't worried about the hardware solution that AGEIA provides, since it's hard to create a way for the hardware to adapt to more modern physics rendering without shipping another new hardware version. And they believe that the next generation of multi-core processors would let developers and gamers opt for the cheaper, more flexible software solution.

Via Gamasutra

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Jeff Yates gets technical about next-gen consoles and PhysX PCs

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