The performance may or may not be important. In a particle sim, it's very important. In a platforming game, maybe not. I would instead point towards other features of collision, like how deep the physical model goes(e.g. correctly ejecting actors from the environment when they jump against a platform - a guarantee of good results almost requires storing an acceleration and testing into the future, rather than relying on a heuristic to guess the right way out of an extant interpenetration.), or how relative positions(camera, planetary orbits, etc.) are synchronized(I ended up building a tree structure with explicit parents so that these movements are always resolved in the correct order).