StiffGIPC: Advancing GPU IPC for Stiff Affine-Deformable Simulation

Kemeng Huang	Xinyu Lu	Huancheng Lin	Taku Komura	Minchen Li

ACM Trans. Graph. (2025)

Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) is a widely used, robust, and accurate method for simulating complex frictional contact behaviors. However, achieving high efficiency remains a major challenge, particularly as material stiffness increases, which leads to slower Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) convergence, even with state-of-the-art preconditioners. In this article, we propose a fully GPU-optimized IPC simulation framework capable of handling materials across a wide range of stiffnesses, delivering consistent high performance and scalability with up to 10 times speedup over state-of-the-art GPU IPC methods. Our framework introduces three key innovations: (1) A novel connectivity-enhanced Multilevel Additive Schwarz (MAS) preconditioner on the GPU, designed to efficiently capture both stiff and soft elastodynamics and improve PCG convergence at a reduced preconditioning cost. (2) A C2-continuous cubic energy with an analytic eigensystem for inexact strain limiting, enabling more parallel-friendly simulations of stiff membranes, such as cloth, without membrane locking. (3) For extremely stiff behaviors where elastic waves are barely visible, we employ affine body dynamics (ABD) with a hash-based two-level reduction strategy for fast Hessian assembly and efficient affine-deformable coupling. We conduct extensive performance analyses and benchmark studies to compare our framework against state-of-the-art methods and alternative design choices. Our system consistently delivers the fastest performance across soft, stiff, and hybrid simulation scenarios, even in cases with high resolution, large deformations, and high-speed impacts.

Kemeng Huang, Xinyu Lu, Huancheng Lin, Taku Komura, Minchen Li (2025). StiffGIPC: Advancing GPU IPC for Stiff Affine-Deformable Simulation. ACM Trans. Graph., 44(3).

@article{huang2025stiffgipc,
author = {Kemeng Huang and Xinyu Lu and Huancheng Lin and Taku Komura and Minchen Li},
title = {StiffGIPC: Advancing GPU IPC for Stiff Affine-Deformable Simulation},
year = {2025},
issue_date = {June 2025},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
volume = {44},
number = {3},
issn = {0730-0301},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3735126},
doi = {10.1145/3735126},
journal = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
month = may,
articleno = {31},
numpages = {20},
keywords = {GPU programming, incremental potential contact, elastodynamics, finite element method, affine body dynamics, preconditioning, cloth simulation}
}