The physics engine is an integral part of gaming, telling how objects should interact when something happens within the game, whether it's how a terrorist crumples to the ground after a headshot, vehicles crashing into a wall or even how an object thrown bounces on the ground. One of the leading engines today is the Havok middleware physics engine, used in games such as Half-Life 2.

Havok, the makers of the software, showed off their latest version's particle and collision physics running on PC and PS3 units at the 2006 CEDEC Developers Conference. All was being rendered in real time.

Besides the physics the Havok engine can now handle character reaction to physics. If you or another character gets hit in such a way that the body gets twisted around it will show that, properly calculating and showing the result.

A very interesting bit was a comparison of the software running between the PS3 and the PC. The engine is fully compatible with all of the next-gen systems- of course, a lot of processing power is required to handle the calculations. One of the pictures in the film loop below shows the PS3 runs about as fast as a triple core PC (in other words, real fast).

Two games currently announced to be using the engine are the upcoming Halo 3 and the latest Sonic The Hedgehog games from Sega.

You can check out the screenshots found at Famitsu's web site below.