If you thought Intel's purchase of Havok pretty much ruled out support for Havok physics acceleration on AMD graphics cards, think again. Hardware maker AMD and physics technology provider Havok, a subsidiary of AMD competitor Intel, have begun working together to optimize the performance of Havok technology on AMD machines. In other words, AMD is responding to Nvidia's buyout of PhysX (and its plans to add PhysX support to GeForce 8 GPUs) by teaming up with Havok.

"The success of Havok as a cross platform software company is predicated on our willingness to listen to the needs of our customers," explained Havok director David O'Meara, who noted that the companies hope to investigate CPU "game play simulation" and the "capabilities of massively parallel products." Havok's multi-platform technology is used in over 300 games, going by today's press release. Prominent examples include 2K Boston and 2K Australia's BioShock, Midway Chicago's Stranglehold, and Ensemble Studio's Age of Empires III. The action marks the latest game-oriented move from AMD, which introduced AMD Game!, a console-esque PC hardware brand, last month.