Performance Physics.Checkbox/CheckSphere vs Collider/Trigger

Questions & Answers
1

Hello,
I’m currently working on collision detection. I have some NPC and I need to detect when there is a wall or an obstacle to make them stop or jump.

It’s quite easy to achieve. I use a trigger that I put in front of them to collide with the wall or obstacle and activate a script.

But I could do the same by using Physics.CheckBox in the Update method to see if I collide with something. My question is what is more performant generally speaking , having a GameObject with a collider/trigger and using the OnCollider/Trigger method to call a function or using the Physics class to handle this kind of collision.

2

Colliders will be generally more performant because they are designed to detect collisions every frame.
I guess it’s because they can precalculate values before play, cache variables and so on.

Here’s a nice performance benchmark of colliders vs Physics.OverlapSphere:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/eye8yk/performance_results_collider_vs_overlap_test/

Static methods from Physics may be useful and more performant for non per frame calls where the collider solution might be an overkill.