A circuit arrangement and method utilize predictive load balancing to allocate the workload among hardware threads in a multithreaded physics engine. The predictive load balancing is based at least in part upon the detection of predicted future collisions between objects in a scene, such that the reallocation of respective loads of a plurality of hardware threads may be initiated prior to detection of the actual collisions, thereby increasing the likelihood that hardware threads will be optimally allocated when the actual collisions occur.