There have been some internal beta-releases of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine over the last few weeks (right now it’s beta 7) and I did implement the last beta into my NewtonPlayGround (no release date yet, but soon after NGD 2.00 goes live), to see how it fares. And I must admit that it has come a long way and that most of the commercial physics solutions out there should fear it’s final release. Newton has a very realstic solver, but most people didn’t like that fact that it wasn’t as fast as the other engines, but that’ll be history with version 2.00. And to give you a hint on how fast it’ll run I created three videos showcasing the beta of NGD 2.00 on my Athlon X2 4200+ (which isn’t that fast anymore, so just imagine what you can do on a fast quadcore CPU) :
The first video (WMV-format) shows 100 catapults running at a smooth framerate. Note that those catapults are not faked in any way, they work like the ones in real-life, using joints and a heavy weight at the other end to fire the catapult off. Some other tests show that it’s even possible to run 300 of those at once with interactive framerates.
The second video (WMV-format) shows 925 barrels stacked in four pyramids running smooth. Those barrels are all using convex hulls (dense meshes). It’s even possible to have hundreds of complex rocks roll down a hill at smooth framerates with the new beta.
I now also added a third video (WMV-format) showing 40 skinned ragdolls stacking at interactive framerates. Those of you that implemented skinned ragdolls with the old version of Newton know that it only needed two touching skinned ragdolls in 1.53 to make the framerates dip into single digits. But as you can see in this video, 2.00 lets you stack a lot of those with nice framerates.
And if you don’t want to watch the videos, here are two screenshots from them, that also show the most important value, called tPhysics. It’s the time Newton needs to do physics calculations :
