Isaac performance/realism trade-off

Omniverse Isaac Sim
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Hi, we’re looking at multiple simulator options for different purposes on our teams. Some teams require realistic rending like what Isaac sim excels at, but others require faster simulation speed (running at multiples of real-time) and don’t care about environment realism (can be environment made entirely of gray boxes).

Is Isaac sim able to trade off realism for performance in such a way to support both use cases? We’re debating whether it makes sense to use just Isaac sim for both if we can configure it for each use-case, or if it’s better to build our infra to swap in Isaac for camera work that needs realism, and Gazebo for fast-running simulations. Personally I find the former the better option if we can have it, but I am having trouble finding others using Isaac when prioritizing execution speed with simple graphics.

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Hi @kevin174 - Thank you for your question. Someone from our team will get back to as fast they can.

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To get simpler/faster rendering you can:

  • disabling all materials, set it to -1 to go back to regular.
import carb
carb.settings.get_settings().set_int("/rtx/debugMaterialType", 0)

-hiding lights

  • turn off rendering features in the render settings panel (these will also have equivalent carb settings that can be set in python)

There is no non-rtx rendering mode in isaac sim, but you can disable almost everything (reflections, transparency, etc) to increase execution speed