OvPhysX Backend

OvPhysX Backend#

Warning

OvPhysX is highly experimental and is not recommended for general use yet. The public surface is changing rapidly while the backend is under active development. This page is a placeholder and will be expanded once the in-flight integration work lands on develop.

OvPhysX is a kit-less variant of the PhysX backend. It drives PhysX directly (without the Omniverse Kit runtime) and reads scene-level solver parameters from the USD PhysicsScene prim rather than from a Python config. The Python config OvPhysxCfg only exposes the handful of GPU buffer sizes that are not represented on the USD schema.

OvPhysX is selected through OvPhysxCfg:

from isaaclab.sim import SimulationCfg
from isaaclab_ovphysx.physics import OvPhysxCfg

sim_cfg = SimulationCfg(physics=OvPhysxCfg())

Why use OvPhysX?#

  • Kit-less execution. OvPhysX avoids Omniverse Kit, which makes it a useful experimental path for headless deployments and for backends that don’t need the Kit runtime stack.

  • USD-as-source-of-truth. Solver parameters are taken from the PhysicsScene USD prim, so authoring tools that already manage USD scenes do not need a parallel Python config.

What works today#

The asset and sensor surface tracks PhysX, but only a subset is implemented and validated at the time of writing. Rigid Object support is merged on develop; the remaining assets and sensors are landing through a series of stacked pull requests:

Other sensors (Frame Transformer, Joint Wrench, PVA, Ray Caster) and the rendering surface are not yet wired up for OvPhysX.

Status and follow-up#

This page is intentionally a stub. Once the in-flight OvPhysX work merges, this section will be expanded with full installation, configuration, and supported feature lists matching the other backends. The expansion is tracked in issue #5634.

For architectural context, see Multi-Backend Architecture.