Collisions vs. lasers

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I did an experiment to see whether lasers or collisions lag more.
I tested 256 lasers with maxRays == 1000, 256 lasers with maxRays == 1, and 256 gears with 3 teeth hitting boxes.

Results:
Lasers with maxRays==1: 9-11% of realtime
Lasers with maxRays==1000: 9-10% of realtime
Collisions: 80-100% of realtime

Conclusions:
Collisions are fastest by a lot. maxRays doesn't make much of a difference to lasers, but lasers are slow anyway.

Of course, lasers are much better for some things such as long range data transfer.

The scenes I used, in case anyone wants to criticise me for some reason:

Collisions vs. lasers experiment scene 1

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Collisions vs. lasers experiment scene 2

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Collisions vs. lasers experiment scene 3

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[KarateBrot]

Yeah and lasers are more precise than collisions but they aren't good in some cases. Collisions can have advantages but so do lasers.

[Versieon]

The only problem with the gears is that the script is not updated every frame, it skips some frames. The lasers update every frame. I would try using a alternating collider and see how much lag that causes.

[KarateBrot]

The lasers update every frame.

as far as i know they don't either. the laser frequency depends on your screen refreshing rate. mine is about 60Hz. You can test it. I made a scene to detect the laser frequency. so if you're running the simulation @ 100Hz with 100% realtime it only hits about 60%. but gradyfitz told me he got about 140Hz with his lasers so it's very different if it will hit on every frame or if not.

[Versieon]

What about an alternating collider, those update every frame, right?

[KarateBrot]

yep they collide every frame. i think it would be better if lasers also collide once per frame.

[Mystery]

Shouldn't alternating collider's operate at 50hz?

[KarateBrot]

Shouldn't alternating collider's operate at 50hz?

that's dependent on the object you're putting the oncollide code in. It can be 50Hz but also 100Hz

[mitbrown]

This is really comparing the 'apples to oranges'... As far as I know the collisions only cause lag on the CPU. while lasers are a bit less CPU intensive, they put more strain into the graphics processing.
I could be wrong though. sorry for the bump.

[kilebantick]

The lasers update every frame.

140Hz with his lasers so it's very different if it will hit on every frame or if not.

Pretty sure he was bullshitting you, i see him and his computer often, and trust me, his screen is NOT capable of 140hz, under any circumstance xD Well, i was told that the frequency of lasers was based entirely off of the refresh rate of your screen