As announced at GDC 2018 talk “Nvidia GameWorks: New Simulation Features” (which you can view at GDC Vault now) PhysX SDK team is planning to shift the development focus from reaching maximum performance to increasing quality of the simulation, to better comprehend use cases such as robotic simulation and VR games.
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Common problems, that one can face with current PhysX rigid body solver (and other game oriented physics engines in general) include innacurate simulation of complex jointed objects, erratic interactions between objects with high mass difference and instability of small scale simulations.
In order to improve general quality and stability of the simulation without the need to rely on various workarounds (joint projections, unrealistic mass rations, etc) a new non-linear iterative solver is introduced.
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New rigid body solver addresses many of the simulation quality issues while maintaining roughly the same performance level as the default PhysX 3.4 solver.
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Another addition is the updated PxArticulation model, that offers new joint types and more accurate drive model among other improvements, and is once againt geared towards robotics simulation.
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All the new features will be available in the new NVIDIA robotics simulation framework, but also are expected to be included in one of the next PhysX SDK releases.
