Havok, now owned by Intel, is one of the leading providers of physics APIs for games and applications and is now planning to offer it for free for non-commercial use and to “approved game developers on the PC platform” starting in March. It’s unclear why someone would go with Havok though at this point when Ageia, now owned by Nvidia, has their physics API free right now for non-commercial and commercial as well, so it’s available to free for anyone who wants to use it, not just those that can work out a deal with Havok and Intel. Another major advantage of Ageia’s API is that they sell dedicated hardware cards to offload physics processing name PhysX cards. PhysX cards haven’t sold all that well though, but with Nvidia’s purchase of Ageia hardware physics is coming to the masses since they’re working on getting Geforce 8-series and higher video cards to run Ageia’s physics on the GPU. Also, developers won’t be limited to only the PC, since Ageia supports the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. So when you compare the two, unless their’s something I’m missing, Havok doesn’t seem very appealing.

For more info on Havok’s new plans click here.

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