It's been roughly ten months since AMD first announced a partnership with Intel-owned Havok that was meant to improve the way its graphics chips handle physics and other scientific calculations. Now, the company is finally ready to unveil what it has been working on and is expected to host a session about hardware game physics and game realism at the Game Developers Conference this week.
The summary for the session only says that AMD will discuss "the latest on game computing featuring open, standards-based physics with OpenCL and ATI Stream." However, AMD's Catalyst product manager, Terry Makedon, additionally revealed through Twitter that the company will be discussing details of their GPU physics strategy and possibly even feature a demonstration. The event is scheduled for March 26.
While physics acceleration has yet to capture the attention of game developers and the public at large, offering GPU-accelerated support for Havok will put AMD in a more competitive position against Nvidia, which has been pushing its PhysX engine a great deal lately.