Accelerating Physics Engine Components with Embedded FPGAs

In recent years there has been a steady increase in the use of physics engines, deployed in applications such as video games, scientific simulations, computer graphics and film productions. Their main purpose is to simulate the motions of objects based on real-world physics rules. As the complexity of the simulated scenes increases with the use of multiple objects and desirable effects, the computational cost of the physics-related calculations explodes. Typically, physics engines make use of the general-purpose computational capabilities of modern GPUs in order to take advantage of their massively parallel resources. In this paper, we consider the use of FPGAs to accelerate certain demanding components of the physics simulation pipeline aiming to provide better performing solutions at significantly lower energy cost. The results of our work demonstrate that by employing Zynq UltraScale+ devices featuring embedded ARM cores and FPGA fabric, we can accelerate physics computations of the popular Bullet library on highly demanding scenes up to 2.2x compared to high-end GPUs at a fraction of the energy required (up to 44x better energy efficiency).