As it was announced recently, new v7 version (currently in development) of free 3D Rad game engine will switch from ODE physics engine, used curently, to PhysX SDK.

According to developers, advantages from this decision are going to be following:

• faster physics processing, both on normal systems and on systems equipped with recent NVidia cards (where hardware processed physics simulation will allow a very high number of simultaneous simulated bodies).
• more accurate and robust polygonal collision detection (no more crashes on triangles that are too stretched, too small or too big)
• additional collision detection primitives (boxes, capsules), with the ability to stack a high number of objects to create large collapsible buildings.
• built-in breakable joints support, to effectively make in-game objects fully and realistically destructable.
• advanced tire/suspension simulation for cars
• soft bodies
• physics-enabled particles/fluids
• cloth simulation
• bult-in advanced character control
• volumetric force field simulation

End of the year is proper time to gather some statictics and summarize what PhysX SDK has archieved in past 4 years. So, we woud like to present our new article “Popular Physics Engines comparison: PhysX, Havok and ODE“, in which we are trying to compare PhysX SDK with other physics engines presented on the market not in terms of features, quality, performance or something like that – but released game titles.

Article includes basic statistics for Bullet and Newton physics engines, and advanced statictics for PhysX SDK, Havok and ODE – released games quality, platform distribution, and release dynamics for past years.

Ervin Coumans, creator of “Bullet” open-source physics engine, has posted some interesting facts at bulletphysics.com recently. According to article in August 2009 issue of Game Developers Magazine, covering middleware survey results (over 100 senior developers of various development companies surveyed), Physx SDK have the lead with 26.8% in physics libraries rating, next is Havok with 22.7%, third – Bullet at 10.3%, and finally – Open Dynamic Engine at 4.1%.

Source: bulletphysics.com