With all the talk about
OpenCL and Snow Leopard together and how the spec will allow Apple's upcoming hotness to exploit graphics accelerators, it's easy to lose track of the place where the standard could make its biggest impact: gaming. Yes, OpenGL may have lost favor in that realm in recent years, but OpenCL looks to captivate the hearts and GPUs of gamers everywhere by applying some much-needed standardization to the physics acceleration realm, first shown in public at GDC running on some AMD hardware. Havok is demonstrating its Havok Cloth and Havoc Destruction engines, the former of which is embedded below, and we think you'll agree it's quite impressive. OpenCL allows such acceleration to switch between the GPU and CPU seamlessly and as needed depending on which is more available, hopefully opening the door to physics acceleration that actually affects gameplay and doesn't just exist to make you say, "Whoa."
posted Mar 27th 2009 9:46AM
Ahh!! The bald ladies are invading!!
Its about time im getting terribly annoyed with games that have exaggerated clothing effects where cloth wouldnt normally behave in such an extreme manner.
agreed. this should help make Leisure Suit Larry become a much more realistic dating simulation.
While i'm getting annoyed at exaggerated Havoc ragdoll effects. It's cool and all, but the ragdoll stuff is way over the top, needs a bit more rigidity. That said, this cloth engine demo doesn't seem as exaggerated as their ragdoll stuff.
agreed....havock makes everything seem like it is made of inflatable plastic....
rigormortis!! c omon!
I thought graphic technology was driven by pornography! This is only going to improve the first thirty seconds!
What about boobs and certain bodily fluids?
Just think how the Japanese will implement this into their "adult games".
Post an interesting article, a couple comments. Post a free iPod Touch, 20K comments :/
I know, not even the crazy Live blogs from the Apple keynotes get 20k comments :/
Woww, If we could see that kind of effects on a game in the following year or so I would be really satisfied, but really, was the baldness really necessary?
Havoc Hair is apparently still in development.
(supposedly this one actually does hair, though)
Quite honestly, Havoc solver is terrible. I stopped using it long time ago and much rather prefer ClothFX or nCloth in Maya (yes, even at the price of data exchange!). For rigid bodies, it's OK, but nothing spectacular (quite unstable and hardly controllable during simulation), I'd rather go with NextLimit's RealFlow for that as well as for fluid simulation, obviously. For ragdolls, well, again, it's obsolete. I prefer Natural Motion's Endorphine or if really need be I'd go with Havoc, but would rather avoid it.
Hopefully they haven't only improved performance, but the actual solver as well. Otherwise, it's useless...
It does hair too, right? If so, the first thing Team Ninja should do is buy some of this stuff, since their hair algorithms are laughably bad.
so much needed physix acceleration? I doubt it.
I'd rather use graphic card to help encode/decode video instead.
The PhysX card can run code based on CUDA. OpenCL can make programs that are compatible with CUDA. So your PhysX card is still useful.
So
Assumption #1: OpenCL is teh new h0tness
Assumption #2: OpenCL will be good for games
Assertion #1: OpenCL is cross platform friendly
Assertion #2: Games programmed in OpenCL would be stupid easy to port from one platform to another
Question: So are we going to see more Mac/Linux games going forward?
OpenCL lost for a good reason, and this reason still holds.
The only real future Mac has with game would be OnLive. Other than that, Windows 7 (+ DX11 and 3D vision) all the way.
"OpenCL lost for a good reason, and this reason still holds"
TareX, dude, WTF are you talking about? Do you mean OpenGL?
OpenCL is a new Open Computing Language that is a framework for writing programs that makes use of multi-core processors and using GPU as a GPGPU (e.g. like CUDA but open); Apple are going to use it as a core part of their Snow Leopard OS.
OpenGL is the Open Graphics Library that's a standard cross-platform cross-language API; Windows has DirectX which is the Microsoft proprietary competitor, which was extended to Xbox (which is short for DirectX Box). Okay for Windows and Xbox gaming everything is DirectX, but in pretty much all other 3D OpenGL is the only game in town. OpenGL is pretty advanced on some platforms, such as Mac OS X where it is multi-threaded whereas DirectX is still a single-threaded API.
So what reason are you talking about, and why does it still hold?
oupps major fail. typing from work. meant opengl :) forget it
TareX = FAIL
please, stay quiet in ya momma's basement.
Remember back in the day when you could pick if you wanted your game to run in OpenGL or Direct-X?
i always picked directx because it ran better....for the most part that is still true...
OpenGL is great and all because of the crossplatformness....
but the effects and speed direct-X runs at is just better.
Vanillacide, it's not 'like CUDA but open', it is CUDA. I think all they did was search and replace 'cuda' with 'cl' in the standard. It's exactly the same.
So help me out here:
OpenGL = Open Graphic Library
OpenCL = Open Computing Language (can't get much more general than that)
Does OpenCL have the resources to replace OpenGL or will you be using both? If you are using DirectX does that preclude you from using OpenCL too?
What's the likelyhood that a game designed from the ground up using OpenCL will not require windows?
@dan2600
What about back in the day you could also choose 3dFX? Fire that up with the original GTA and it would run stupid fast. Back in the day of the original SLI, PCI all the way...
Whoa.
I think Windows 7 and DX 11 have already won, after watching that video
your a toll but....
+1 agreed
Why, I'm I a Troll?
Because you seem to try to get a discussion started about windows (7 specifically) vs other OS's? While OpenCL is actually cross platform and works on all OS's.
Will we need a special apple-only pair of headphones with a special chip, with a special mouse and keyboard, and then will we need one of those fancy special monitors they plan on releasing that will /only/ work with OpenCL?
/sarcasm
Seriously though, this looks actually pretty nice. Considering you are forced to upgrade to Vista/Windows 7 for DirectX nowadays, (which pisses me off to no end!)
"Seriously though, this looks actually pretty nice. Considering you are forced to upgrade to Vista/Windows 7 for DirectX nowadays, (which pisses me off to no end!)"
I'll take this chance to argue another angle of this DirectX 10 discussion (besides the very true and factual "different architecture" angle).
It's not like this is unprecedentent. 8.1 is the last version for 98/ME, which means DirectX support for the OSes ended near the release of XP (and ME was only a year or two old at that point). At some point OS support has to stop, and when a massive architectural change is ushered in it's not a bad time to do it.
Of course the support has to end at some point, I agree with that.
But they also need to realize that perhaps people /still want XP/. At the time of Windows 98 and all, plenty of people were willing to make the upgrade to Windows 2000(or ME, ugh), and then XP. However, Vista, people are screaming GET IT OFF, and companies are still willing to pre-install it on computers for you.
Many UMPC and netbook manufacturers still stand by XP as well. It's one thing to stop supporting something that nobody has a use for, it's another thing when most of your market is still /going/ to your older products. I mean, really, how many games have you actually seen that has just been DirectX 10 capable?
Barely any!
"At the time of Windows 98 and all, plenty of people were willing to make the upgrade to Windows 2000(or ME, ugh), and then XP. "
But not really if you go back and look at what was said the first year or two XP came out, and the adoption numbers. There was definitely a movement of people wanting to stay on 98 for performance reasons, among other things.
Dan, I'm totally into XP.
I just think it's more practical and all.
And sorry, Microsoft, stop selling XP and probably you'll lose a lot of money.
OH WAIT-
Wow, interesting how OpenCL has this Apple stigma.... although Apple is using it for Snow Leopard, OpenCL is open-source so it will be available for all OS platforms, including Windows - there *are* OpenGL games for WIndows (iD games come to mind, like Doom 3).
To keep it straight, OpenCL isn't a graphics platform anyways, which is why you see models dancing on a flat floor - I imagine developers will use DX11 for the graphics and OpenCL for the Havok physics, which (keep in mind) have been the defacto industry standard for the physics engine since it runs on everything, including minimum specs for Half-Life 2 (2004).
Seriously, some of these comments.
How can you possibly prefer Microsofts proprietary DirectX stuff over cross-platform open goodness such as OpenGL/OpenAL/OpenCL etc. Same with CUDA and ATI Stream, no one wants to be locked into one brand :)
Judging from the 20k comments that free ipod touch recieved, some people still want to be locked into one brand.
Some people want free stuff...
Next up on dancing with the digital stars, Master Chief with Lara Croft.
A little stiff in the shoulders, but I can see this is the start of something BIG! Exponentially, the way things happen in this world.
That's pretty good, but they still have a long way to go before it doesn't look unnatural.
ok , I'm going to go wtf a bit... Havok are owned by Intel... what are they doing on AMD hardware?
Here's my answer to AMD + OpenGL(/OpenCL)
http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=111105&enterthread=y