Havok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corp. and a provider of various middle-ware for game development, along with ATI, graphics products group of Advanced Micro Devices, demonstrated the industry’s first cross-platform physics effects engine that enables realistic behaviour of cloth, fabric, hair, etc. Thanks to OpenCL, Havok Cloth middle-ware can be processed on both ATI and Nvidia graphics chips.

“Havok is committed to delivering highly optimized cross-platform solutions to our game customers and we are pleased to be working with AMD to ensure that gamers enjoy a great user experience when running Havok-powered games on AMD platforms. Unlocking the parallel processing capability of AMD’s hardware provides real advantages to our customers, and the greater the total computing resources available, the better the gaming experience developers can deliver,” said David Coghlan, vice president of development for Havok.

At Game Developers Conference 2009, Havok is showcasing industry-changing technical breakthroughs in real-time clothing simulation, marking the first time that movie-quality cloth has been seen on in-game characters. The ease of integration of the product is highlighted by the fact that the first games to feature Havok Cloth are launching in Spring 2009. It should be noted that those titles are based on Havok Cloth released in early 2008 and are not OpenCL-based.

Havok Cloth is a platform-optimized run-time software development kit and toolset that significantly increases the realism of game characters and environments by enabling character designers to add true-to-life, physically-based motion to garments, environmental objects and other deformable items like hair, bellies or tails. Havok Cloth also minimizes the time that artists spend on animating the behavior of character garments and environmental cloth in games.

Thanks to optimization of the latest Havok Cloth version for OpenCL standard, the new cloth simulation engine can utilize both graphics processing units that support OpenCL as well as traditional central processing units. Presently Havok Cloth can take advantage of ATI Stream technology supported by Radeon graphics chips. Later on it will also gain support of Nvidia GeForce, S3 Graphics Chrome and Intel Larrabee graphics processors.

Tags: Havok, ATI, AMD, Radeon, Nvidia, Geforce, S3 Graphics, Intel Larrabee