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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

The GitHub claims:

> Genesis delivers an unprecedented simulation speed -- over 43 million FPS when simulating a Franka robotic arm with a single RTX 4090 (430,000 times faster than real-time).

That math works out to… 23.26 nanoseconds per frame. Uhh… no they don’t simulate a robot arm in 23 nanoseconds? That’s literally twice as fast as a single cache miss?

They may have an interesting platform. I’m not sure. But some of their claims scream exaggeration which makes me not trust other claims.

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It's possible they're executing many simulations in parallel, and counting that. 16k robot arms executing at 3k FPS each is much more reasonable on a 4090. If you're effectively fuzzing for edge cases, this would have value.

Yeah it’s gotta be something like that. The whole claim comes across as rather dishonest. If you’re simulating 16,000 arms at 3000 fps each then say that. Thats great. Be clear and concise with your claims.

Agreed.

The reason why they are using the FPS (frames-per-second) term in a different way, is that this robotics simulator is primarily going to be used for reinforcement learning, where you run thousands of agents in parallel. In that context, the total "batched" throughput of how many frames you can generate per second is crucial for training your policy network quickly - than the actual latency between frames (which is more important for real-time tasks like gaming)

The fine text at the bottom of speed comparison video on the project homepage says "With `hibernation = True`". Based on a search through the code, the hibernation setting appears to skip simulating components which reach steady state.

If you read their documentation, then you see that what they are referring to, is when they run 30k instances in parallel.

"Now, let’s turn off the viewer, and change batch size to 30000 (consider using a smaller one if your GPU has a relatively small vram): ...

Running the above script on a desktop with RTX 4090 and 14900K gives you a futuristic simulation speed – over 43 million frames per second, this is 430,000 faster than real-time. Enjoy!"

https://genesis-world.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/ge...

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