In Mafia II, as you may notice from our comparison video, clothing simulation on main character (Vito Scaletta) is present regardless to APEX PhysX settings, main difference is in Cloth detalization and used technologies – standart PhysX Cloth (APEX PhysX Off) and more advanced APEX Clothing module (APEX PhysX Medium/High).

Clothing detalization is mostly determined by number of vertices, forming a physical cloth mesh.

So, just for curiosity, we decided to count them in Mafia II (with help of AgPerfMon profiler), using different APEX PhysX settings and various Vito’s suits.

Leather Jacket.

Casual Suit with Hat.

Casual Suit with Raincoat.

According to data we’ve collected, Clothing based on APEX Framework is 6x times (in average) more detailed than low-resolution PhysX Cloth you can see with APEX “Off” settings.  As result, APEX based Cloth behaves more realistically.

But what about performance – APEX Clothing is 6x times more detailed, maybe it is running 6x times slower ?

Performance.

For testing purposes we’ve used simple character motion sequence, from begining of Chapter 9. All character clothing is disabled except for Vito.

Thus, while APEX Clothing assets are containing 5-7x times more vertices than PhysX Cloth suits (APEX PhysX OFF settings), performance degrades only about 15%. And don’t forget, that in both cased Cloth simulation is running purely on CPU.