Lets start out by saying that the Havok FX product is not an NVidia technology, it is made by Havok, a physics middleware company.
Havok FX will run on any DX9 or greater card that has the horsepower to pull it off without hammering the frame rate of the game. It will even work on ATI cards, eventually, but nothing has been officially announced yet. The physics engine does not need a dedicated GPU, it can be shared with graphics. Again, on todays cards, this may not be the brightest idea in the world, but that will change as GPU power advances.
The 'hard' stuff isn't all that well suited to GPU style math. Neither side really needs to talk to the other in a meaningful way, hence the breakdown. Can you do one side on the other? Sure. Does it make sense? Not so much. I stand by my earlier conclusions that the Ageia way, basically a single chip that does both well, is better than the Havok FX route, at least for now.
As it stands now though, Havok FX isn't going to set the world on fire, it is mainly a tool for devs to get their feet wet and experiment. In a year or two, when there are mature products from both the Havok and Ageia camps, well, then we can decide which is better.
Članak