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Years ago there was PhysX... how does this compare?

This will eventually replace PhysX, some of its developers are working on Newton Physics. Newton Physics has multiple solvers, including MuJoCo-Warp and is easier to customize and extend.

Their FAQ explicitly says

> Will Newton replace PhysX?

> No, the two engines serve different primary goals

https://newton-physics.github.io/newton/faq.html#will-newton...

Probably the parent commenter has much more insider info than all of us since he's currently at NVIDIA...

From what I understand, PhysX has been built primarily as a physics engine middleware for games. So when folks at NVIDIA tried to extend this engine to robotics (for IsaacSim/IsaacLab) it seems they've faced lots of challenges (mainly with subpar multi-env performance and inaccurate solver, but also lots of technical debt over the years). So changing the internal engine to a more robotics-oriented one (Mujoco-warp) doesn't seem far-fetched. Nowadays for game engine development there are much better middleware CPU-based physics engines available (mainly Jolt Physics) - and GPU physics in games aren't that popular anymore due to pragmatic reasons (the GPU -> CPU roundtrip defeats the whole purpose of better performance)

I was assuming the context of robot learning (IsaacLab), where Newton Physics will eventually replace PhysX. Newton Physics doesn't target games or other areas.

Ah the last sentence was just about PhysX in general.

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