Benchmark: Bullet - PhysX2 - PhysX3

I finally got around to doing some very basic benchmarking of the physics plugins.

System Specs:
OS: Windows 8.1
CPU: Core i7 2600
Ram: 8GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Compiler: VS 2010 in release mode
T3D Version: 3.5
PhysX 2: 2.8.4
PhysX 3: 3.3
Bullet: 2.81

For the physx3 plugin i used the physx3_basic branch from my repo here github.com/rextimmy/Torque3D/tree/physx3_basic. I used this instead of the more feature rich physx branch simply because it doesn't modify any files outside of the plugin base. I also used this same branch for the physx2 and bullet builds too, it's based off T3D 3.5 development branch with the only difference been the addition of the physx3 plugin. I have left everything with the physics plugin in it's default state, so timing and thread count etc is exactly the same as the default T3D download.

To run the benchmark i created a small class called (suprise) benchMark and all it does is run for X amount of seconds and dumps the FPS at one second intervals. From core/scripts/client/mission.cs i added the following

function clientStartMission()
{
   ........
   //run benchmark for 20 seconds and run disconnect script function when done
   benchMarkStart(20,"disconnect();");
   profilerEnable(true);
}

function clientEndMission()
{
  ........
   %time = getRealTime();
   profilerDumpToFile("results/profile_"@%time@".txt");
   profilerEnable(false);
   benchMarkDumpToFile("results/benchmark_"@%time@".txt");
}

So the benchmarking class is the only other addition to the engine code. Works great, you just run a level sit back and it runs for X amount of seconds and than disconnects and spits you back out to the main gui where you can run the tests again and again.

To obtain the results i ran each test level 4 times and took the averages for these 4 runs.

I had three test levels, one with 400 boxes, one with 800 boxes and the last with 1200 boxes. The time (in seconds) is displayed down the bottom with the FPS up the side.

Results:




I do have the profile data to go with this if anyone wants to see that too.

Disclaimer:

Obviously this is not the best real world example because all it is doing is dropping boxes and how many games do you play where you see 1200 boxes fall out of the sky and nothing else ;-). There is no raycasting or sweep tests etc so maybe one day if i get more free time a better benchmark would be in order.

Neither Physx version is using any GPU acceleration, it's all cpu based.