As promised, NVIDIA has released new PhysX SDK 4.0 physics engine.

Unlike the change from version 2.8 to 3.0, the upgrade to version 4 does not bring any significant API changes. However, it was decided to mark this release with a major version increment because of two major innovations that were added: The TGS solver and the reduced coordinate articulations.

Key Features:

* Temporal Gauss-Seidel (TGS) solver

TGS solver offers several advantages over default PGS solver – improved convergence, improved handling of high-mass ratios, minimized energy introduced when correcting penetrations and improved joint drive accuracy.

While TGS solver is generally little slover thas default PGS, it can be simulated on both CPU or GPU.

* Reduced coordinate articulations

In comparison to default maximal articulations, this articulation implementation is designed for robotics use-cases. It supports revolute, prismatic, fixed and spherical joints. It was written to favor accurate simulation and produces results that are very close to analytic models of kinematic chains. In addition, it provides inverse dynamics functionality.

* New automatic box prunning (ABP) broad-phase

ABP broad-phase is an revisited implementation of multi-box prunning (introduced in SDK 3.4). It automatically manages world bounds and broad-phase regions, thus offering better out of the box performance for many use cases. It is now enabled as default broad-phase solution.

* Optional torsional friction model to simulate rotational friction when there is just a single point of contact.

* New BVH structure supporting better performance for actors with many shapes.

And many more ! Full Release Notes for the 4.0 release can be found here.

PhysX SDK 4.0 will full source code under BSD license is available at: github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX