PhysX document: Scene queries are performed in three phases: broad phase, midphase and narrow phase.
Broad phase traverses the global scene spatial partitioning structure to find the candidates for mid and narrow phases.
midphase traverses the triangle mesh and heightfield internal culling structures, to find a smaller subset of the triangles in a mesh reported by the broad phase.
Narrow phase performs exact intersection tests (ray test for raycast() queries, and exact sweep shape tests or overlap tests for sweep() and overlap() queries).
GDC2013上Gino van den Bergen的分享:Physics for Game Programmers: Spatial Data Structures
内容:1)物理引擎中的碰撞检测(collision query);2)用于加速碰撞检测的常用空间数据结构
物理引擎使用空间数据结构的首要目的就是要加速query,包括离散碰撞检测(discrete collision detection)、连续碰