We have a strong believe that physics support will play a very important role in the next generation battle and that the GPU who manages to does better with physics will actually make a performance point.
With this in mind we know that Nvidia is about to unveil
WHQL driver that supports Nvidia’s PhysX while ATI plans to support Intel’s
Havok engine but as a CPU only acceleration.
Sources close to ATI have told Fudzilla that AMD plans to
support Havok in ATI hardware whenever it makes performance sense. Moreover
they told us that they want to do physics on a GPU only if this will add to
an overall performance of the game.
You can remember GRAW and first Ageia benchmarks when you
would get better PhysX but lower FPS if you would use Ageia PhysX card. This
might easily happen with Nvidia’s GPU implementation and ATI simply wants to
avoid this.
It looks that ATi will bring Havok support on GPU when the
overall gaming experience gets better by doing that but still some voices
closer to Nvidia are keep repeating the rumour that Intel is keeping a Havok
GPU acceleration for its Larrabee. We still don’t know if this is true or not.