As the power of consoles evolves, so too must the middleware governing it. This especially rings true for Havok, whose physics engine has been a staple of nearly ever kind of game on the market. Speaking to GamingBolt, Head of Product Management at Havok Andrew Bowell explained how the company was effectively utilizing the CPU cores of the PS4 and Xbox One.
“Havok has a long history of multi-core support. When the early devkits for Xbox 360 and PS3 were being circulated in 2005 it was clear that the shift to multi-core was fully underway and would be a major feature of the console hardware landscape. Since the previous console era, Havok has had the advantage of targeting two console generations and numerous major revisions of our technologies. This has allowed us to be heavily optimized across the board for many core CPUs.
“With the very latest iteration of Havok Physics 2013, we have been able to push the envelope even further. The goal for software targeting multi-core CPUs is two-fold: firstly you want to remove or minimize any single-threaded only bottlenecks and secondly you want to smoothly and evenly utilize all available CPU cores. With Havok Physics 2013 we have been able to reach both these milestones allowing us to fully multi-thread our engine in all areas and also scale utilization linearly across all available CPU cores.”
This will not only allow for more realistic physics across a far larger scope than before but will ensure that CPUs of the PS4 and Xbox One are not taxed in the process. It’s early days yet when it comes to the power of next gen consoles so stay tuned as we bring you more updates.
