Benchmark

This page reports representative timing comparisons between RaiSim and another widely used multi-body physics engine (MuJoCo) on articulated-dynamics workloads. These are historical measurements from the private release-validation suite, with the machine and workload settings recorded below. For general tuning guidance, see Performance.

Environment

All numbers on this page were collected on a single machine with the following configuration.

Component	Detail
Machine	Apple MacBook Air (MacBookAir10,1), Apple M1 SoC, 8 CPU cores (4 performance + 4 efficiency), 8 GB unified memory.
Operating system	macOS 26.5.1 (build 25F80), arm64.
Compiler	Apple Clang 21.0.0 (Xcode toolchain), C++20, target arm64-apple-darwin.
Benchmark run	August 7, 2026, from clean RaiSim revision 84f7ad114f890aa31ca5255e5481393d61830895 (v0.4.1-1136-g84f7ad11).
RaiSim build	Current optimized RaiSim build, CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release (-O3 -DNDEBUG) with -mcpu=apple-m1.
MuJoCo build	MuJoCo 3.4.1, compiled from source as part of the benchmark suite (same compiler and Release flags).
Threading	Single threaded. Both engines run the simulation loop on one core; no multi-threading or SIMD batching across bodies is used. OMP_NUM_THREADS, OPENBLAS_NUM_THREADS, MKL_NUM_THREADS, and VECLIB_MAXIMUM_THREADS were all set to 1.
Metric	Wall-clock seconds for the timed simulation loop of each scene (scene construction is excluded). Lower is better; Speedup (R/M) is the MuJoCo time divided by the RaiSim time.
Settings	Each benchmark/backend pair was run three times with its default arguments (the per-benchmark step counts listed below). The table and charts report the median; the table also shows the minimum and maximum. The RaiSim and MuJoCo variants use matching scene parameters and the same integration timestep, so the two engines simulate equivalent scenes.

Measure the distributed package

The comparison runner and its MuJoCo backend are maintained in the private engine repository. They are not build targets in raisim2Lib. The results below describe that recorded run, rather than a benchmark of the installed 2.6.0 package.

To measure the binary package on your machine, build the public timing examples:

cmake -S . -B build-examples -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DRAISIM_EXAMPLE=ON
cmake --build build-examples --target anymal_standing_benchmark \
    articulated_system_benchmark --parallel 12
OMP_NUM_THREADS=1 OPENBLAS_NUM_THREADS=1 MKL_NUM_THREADS=1 \
    ./build-examples/examples/anymal_standing_benchmark --steps=1000000

On Windows, build with --config Release and run build-examples\\bin\\anymal_standing_benchmark.exe. Repeat the same command at least three times, keeping the package version, scene, timestep, step count, and machine fixed. These examples measure RaiSim only and do not reproduce the private comparison scenes or the published ratios. See Build, Test, and Benchmark for other available timing examples.

What the benchmarks simulate

Each scene is described below with its articulation (joint types and degrees of freedom), its collision/contact content, the integration timestep, and the number of simulation steps timed. “DOF” is the number of generalized velocity coordinates the dynamics solves for. A floating base contributes 6 DOF (3 translation + 3 rotation).

Benchmark (id)	Steps	Scene details
chain10_speed	100,000	One articulated chain with a fixed base and 10 links joined by 10 spherical joints (3 DOF each) → 30 DOF. Each joint has a spring-damper. No collision geometry (the link spheres are visual only), so there is no contact — this is pure articulated forward dynamics. Timestep 0.001 s.
chain20_speed	100,000	Same as chain10_speed but 20 links and 20 spherical joints → 60 DOF. No collision, no contact. Timestep 0.001 s.
anymal_standing	1,000,000	One ANYmal quadruped: floating base + 12 revolute joints = 18 DOF, under PD position control. It stands on a flat ground plane. ANYmal’s collision geometry is primitive shapes (a trunk box plus cylinders and spheres on the legs); the four feet rest on the ground, giving about four persistent contacts. Friction coefficient 0.8, timestep 0.002 s.
anymal_falling	100,000	The same ANYmal (18 DOF), but no ground is added — the robot falls freely under gravity. There is no contact, so this isolates floating-base articulated dynamics. Timestep 0.002 s.
heightmap_anymal_speed	200,000	One ANYmal (18 DOF) on a procedurally generated fractal height-map terrain (20 m × 20 m, 100 × 100 samples, 3 fractal octaves). Contacts form between the feet and the terrain cells. Timestep 0.002 s.
primitive_speed	100,000	No articulated system. 32 rigid bodies — 16 boxes (0.4 m cubes) and 16 spheres (radius 0.15 m) — arranged in a 4 × 4 grid, each sphere stacked above a box, dropped onto a flat ground plane. Contacts are box–ground, sphere–box, and box–box primitive pairs. Timestep 0.002 s.

Results

In the recorded run, RaiSim was 2.59× to 6.23× faster than MuJoCo across these six workloads. The charts below show both the median timings and the relative speedup.

RaiSim vs MuJoCo (seconds; median with min–max in parentheses)

Benchmark	RaiSim median (min–max)	MuJoCo median (min–max)	Speedup (R/M)
Chain20 speed	0.433 (0.433–0.434)	2.697 (2.694–2.700)	6.23×
Heightmap ANYmal speed	0.914 (0.913–0.916)	4.346 (4.339–4.375)	4.75×
Primitive speed	2.729 (2.664–2.744)	10.904 (10.793–11.076)	4.00×
Chain10 speed	0.214 (0.214–0.215)	0.739 (0.739–0.742)	3.46×
ANYmal standing	3.528 (3.515–3.560)	10.969 (10.968–11.359)	3.11×
ANYmal falling	0.171 (0.171–0.174)	0.444 (0.444–0.449)	2.59×

Absolute times depend on hardware, compiler, and scene configuration, so treat them as relative magnitudes rather than fixed specifications.

Interpreting the comparison

These measurements describe the six scenes and configurations above. They do not isolate the contribution of the dynamics algorithm, contact solver, or implementation details, and do not establish a speedup for other scenes or package versions. Use the public timing examples and your application workload when evaluating the current binary package.