Newton 1.0 General Availability

NVIDIA announced Newton 1.0 GA at GTC 2026, a production-ready GPU-accelerated physics engine designed for industrial robotics simulation. The open-source framework is built on NVIDIA Warp and OpenUSD, providing both speed and realism—a historically difficult tradeoff in physics simulation.

Key Capabilities

Newton is architected as a modular framework supporting multiple solvers and simulation components:

• Rigid-body solvers: Ships with MuJoCo 3.5 (MJWarp) from Google DeepMind and Kamino from Disney Research, each optimized for different robotics scenarios (legged systems, robotic hands, closed-loop mechanisms)
• Deformable simulation: Handles cables, cloth, volumetric objects, and granular materials via Vertex Block Descent (VBD) and Implicit Material Point Method (iMPM) solvers
• Advanced collision detection: Supports SDF-based collision for complex CAD-exported geometries and hydroelastic contacts with continuous pressure distributions for tactile sensing
• Format flexibility: Supports MJCF, URDF, and OpenUSD runtime descriptions, enabling integration with existing robot assets and workflows

Performance and Integration

Newton achieves significant performance gains through GPU acceleration: MuJoCo Warp reaches 252x speedup for locomotion and 475x speedup for manipulation tasks compared to previous implementations on NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Series hardware.

The simulator integrates natively with NVIDIA Isaac Sim 6.0 and Isaac Lab 3.0, creating streamlined workflows from robot description through policy training and evaluation for both reinforcement and imitation learning.