NVIDIA PhysX SDK 3.3 Beta 2 Released

2013/07/11 JeGX

PhysX 3 rigid body test with GLSL Hacker

NVIDIA has published a new version of its PhysX SDK in beta version. PhysX SDK 3.3 is available for Windows, Linux, Android and Win8ARM. No Mac OSX version for the moment 🙁

Among the multiple changes and improvements, NVIDIA has updated the cloth module:

Significantly improved cloth behavior and GPU performance.

In my recent tests with clothes in my PhysX plugin for GLSL Hacker, I found a weird limitation in the simulation of flags: a mesh grid with more than 33×33 vertices is simulated on CPU only, no way to run the simulation on GPU. I will test that new SDK asap to see how cloth module works in GPU…

PhysX 3 cloth test with GLSL Hacker
A flag made up of 33×33 vertices simulated on GPU

Other news, the SDK includes now many small code snippets that show specific parts of the PhysX engine instead of one and enormous code sample that does everything (the big code sample is still there). Nice work NVIDIA PhysX team, you listen to your users 😉

PhysX SDK 3.3 Release Highlights

Added PhysXDevice/64.dll to the PC packages. See Windows readme for more details.
Added support for the NVIDIA Kepler GPU architecture.
Added support for the Nintendo Wii U console.
Added support for Windows 8 Modern UI applications (ARM and x86).
Ported our SIMD library to the ARM NEON architecture.
Multi Box Pruning (MBP) is offered as an alternative broad phase algorithm to Sweep And Prune (SAP). MBP shows improved performance when all objects are moving or when inserting large numbers of objects. Its generic performance might be inferior to SAP when many objects are sleeping.
Significant performance and stability optimizations for rigid body solver.
New function to compute the minimum translational distance and direction to separate two overlapping geometry objects.
New ‘PCM’ contact generation mode which is often faster and more robust than the still available legacy path.
Improved performance of scene queries and contact reports.
Improved behavior and performance of Continuous Collision Detection (CCD).
Reduced memory footprint of rigid body classes.
Added support for sharing shapes among rigid bodies.
Significantly improved cloth behavior and GPU performance.
Added support for cloth colliding against itself, other cloth instances, and scene geometry.
Improved useability of binary and xml serialization.
Memory can be saved for objects that do not participate in the simulation and are used for scene queries only. For details see the new flag PxActorFlag::eDISABLE_SIMULATION.