Inquiry About Collision Detection Benchmark Comparing Newton with FCL and COAL

[Daoming-Chen]

Hi Newton Physics team,

First, thank you for your impressive work on Newton Physics and its GPU-accelerated physics simulation using NVIDIA Warp! I'm particularly interested in the collision detection capabilities of your project and how they perform compared to established libraries like FCL and HPP-FCL.

I couldn't find any existing benchmarks comparing Newton's collision detection algorithms with FCL or COAL in terms of speed, accuracy, or memory usage. Have you conducted or are you planning to conduct such a benchmark? It would be incredibly valuable for the community, especially for those working in robotics and real-time simulation, to see how Newton's Warp-based approach stacks up against these libraries. If there are no current plans, would you be open to collaborating on or supporting the creation of such a benchmark?

Looking forward to your thoughts, and happy to discuss further!

[adenzler-nvidia]

Hi there - and thanks for the kind words.

Our collision detection capabilities are still under heavy development, so the focus so far has been on designing the API and bringing up some of the fundamental features to enable the rest of newton to be developed as well. At this point I would say it's a bit too early to start comparing to existing solutions as many things are not set in stone yet, but we are obviously looking at existing solutions to guide some design decisions and performance optimizations.

We are very interested in benchmarks and results and don't want to stop you from doing this right now, but unfortunately we have limited resources to help you at this time. We will definitely reconsider once things are more stable. For now, the best we can do is advise on any issues you're facing, but unfortunately for you any active involvement is going to be minimal at least until the first major release.

We'll definitely reach out to you here if any of this changes.

[Daoming-Chen]

Thank you for your reply

I would be very happy to participate in or help create this collision detection benchmark once Newton release a stable version.

I look forward to future updates. Best of luck with the continued development!

[momo-van]

We will take you up on that offer! Newton 1.0 is coming soon.

In mid March, we will publish some benchmarks comparing NVIDIA Warp with IGL, FCL and Embree for geometry processing. I will post here the links once available.

@mmacklin @ehsanhaghighat for viz.