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Monday 17th September 2007

Intel buys Havok

Posted at: 11:06am 17th September 2007 by Alex Watson

Intel shells out for game physics firm

Intel Havok

The Autumn Intel Developer Forum is taking place this week in San Francisco, and while the keynotes don't begin until tomorrow, Intel has made one big announcement already. It's buying Havok, the company famous for its physics software which makes the bodies and blown-up bits bounce realistically in many games, including recent top sellers such as Bioshock.


Havok will become a solely owned subsidiary of Intel, but according to the press release, will "continue to operate as an independent business working with its customers in developing digital media content."

As Charlie Demerjian from the Inquirer points out, it's an interesting and unexpected move from Intel. Havok was undertaking work on GPGPU, collaborating with both Nvidia and ATi on the much-hyped attempts to use graphics cards to process game physics. Whether this relationship will survive the Intel purchase is a big question. It's also unclear what Intel's move means for Ageia; on the one hand, for Intel to show such an interest in game physics and to back it up with a financial commitment certainly indicates it's a serious area of the market. However, Intel certainly isn't going to be interested in helping sell PhysX cards - running physics on multi-core processors will be far more of a priority.


You can read Intel's full press release here.



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Megapig

What the hell... nvidia not working well with Quake? Quake III gold for me got me the best gameplay that started my custompc and game building career....... then quake4 came along, a lil upgrade, and now is eff-ing awesome! But i see ur point with the doom3 and quake 3 thing, its like chalk and cheese, intel vs amd, nvidia vs ati(amd), me and gareth..... LOL

Comment by Lightning_Pete at 11:05pm 25th September 2007

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Bright side..

Maybe the price of Ageia's Physics cards will drop if there's a little competition. Microsoft could push this V hard, and Ageia would certainly be put under pressure...

Comment by Nemiro at 4:00pm 18th September 2007

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hmmm

this could be very interesting, totally agree with both posts but there could be some benefits eg on board physics could be a way forward although the option of physics designed to run on intel cpu's only could also appear which im sure amd fans will love

Comment by MDK_UK at 5:13pm 17th September 2007

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which way are we heading?

Like the post below this could be worrying news. Are we soon to see chipset exclusive titiles? the same way in which Xbox and Playstation fight over exclusives for there machines, will intel and co be figithing for exclusives for there chipsets?

Comment by illF8d at 1:01pm 17th September 2007

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omg

i do not like this mix of companies for example nvidia is making chipsets for amd/ati. its going to be quake 3 and doom 3 all overagain remember doom3 not working well with ati cards and quake3 not working well with nivdia cards. the last thing we need is a bigger mix of companies.

Comment by megapig at 12:28pm 17th September 2007

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