How to compile and use Bullet3 with OpenCL support

Bullet is a popular open-source 3D physics engine. Bullet3 is its fabled branch that uses GPUs and OpenCL in its rigid body pipeline.

• Take note that you need to have a GPU that has OpenCL support. On my system, I used a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.

• Install the latest NVIDIA driver for your Ubuntu. The driver installation also installs the Installable Client Driver (ICD) required by OpenCL. On my system, I installed the NVIDIA 352 driver package.

• Clone the Bullet3 repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3.git

Note: By default, OpenCL examples are not featured in the Example Browser. If you would like to have this, get my Bullet3 fork here or just replace the examples/ExampleBrowser/CMakeLists.txt from it in your repository.

• Compile the Bullet3 code and examples:

$ cd build3
$ cmake ..
$ make

• If you would like to install the library:

$ sudo make install

• Invoke the Example Browser to try out many physics tests and see how the engine fares:

$ examples/ExampleBrowser/App_ExampleBrowser

• If you want to try the OpenCL tests, invoke it as:

$ examples/ExampleBrowser/App_ExampleBrowser --enable_experimental_opencl

You must be able to see two new tests listed under OpenCL (Experimental) and be able to try them out.

Tried with: Ubuntu 14.04