StiffGIPC: Advancing GPU IPC for stiff affine-deformable simulation

Abstract

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 the state-of-the-art preconditioners. In this paper, 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 10x 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 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 multi-layer 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. Our framework will be fully open-sourced upon acceptance.