Written by I have been working on PhysiBricks for a while now. I have only been testing it on my 5 year old laptop, and it has been running at descent frame rates. I expected that the game would run better on the Xbox 360. I was wrong! Turns out that XNA on the Xbox 360 has poor performance for performing floating point operations. This isn’t very good news, especially when I want to make Physics games, using a Physics engine, which does A LOT of floating point operations.
I am using the 3.3.1 version of the Farseer Physics Engine and found that the “Breakable Bodies and Explosions” Sample drops the framerate to 2fps on the Xbox 360. On my laptop this same example keeps a constant 30fps. It appears the main problem has to do with the higher (100+) number of bodies colliding at the same time.
I find this a bit disappointing, as I was hoping to create physics games with a large number of simple bodies in play at the same time. I will need to watch the number of bodies that are play in a time and make sure I continually test on the XBox 360 to keep performance up.
I should also point out that my test were performed with a release build and without the debugger attached. Debug mode with a debugger attached really degrades performance.
