Intel announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase the software developing company Havok, which is specialized in software applications and tools that are related to gaming and digital content creation while at the same time being one of the most important providers of software physics.

In most modern day games a measure of software physics is encountered despite the general industry trend of using a dedicated hardware solution for all those physics computations or of offloading some of them on the graphics processing unit. Despite that trend, most physics computations are still dome at the level of the central processing unit and this fact may explain Intel's sudden interest in a company that is involved in the development of software physics.

''Havok is a proven leader in physics technology for gaming and digital content, and will become a key element of Intel's visual computing and graphics efforts'', said Renee J. James, Intel vice president and general manager of Software and Solutions Group, who was cited by the news site dailytech. Under the acquisition agreement Havok will work as an independent Intel division in order to affect the current partnerships as little as possible.

Havok's active partnerships are including deals with most important names on the gaming market segment, from both the hardware and the software points of view and the software developing company can name among its partners companies like Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, NVIDIA and AMD. Currently Havok offers and supports the physics implemented in a number of hugely popular games like Halo 3, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Half Life 2 and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, along with professional physics implementations that are needed in modeling and engineering programs like Autodesk's 3DS Studio Max 9.

A number of companies like Ageia, AMD and Nvidia seek to popularize the hardware processing of the in game physics on a dedicated hardware component. While Ageia already has on the market a number of products aimed at this segments, AMD and Nvidia only previewed a number of similar solutions which are said to be integrated into the graphics cards. Their solutions, CrossFire and SLI Physics, are now only in the design stages and more importantly both are hardware implementations of the Havok FX engine.