Disney Research found a different mathematical approach to solve the extremely complex equations necessary to render realistic fabrics.
As you can see from the video released with the official paper, the resulting simulation is extremely accurate. Like almost every algorithm, it’s not a generic solution to every cloth rendering problem. It performs better on large problems (more than 25k vertices), stiffer materials and small masses. Also, as stated by the authors, time to solution doesn’t really scale linearly, but there’s room for improvement.
Anyway, it’s a great addition to the 3D rendering algoritms’ world.