The purpose of this paper is a comparison of two different methods that can be used for collision detection. One method is called the ray-crossing method, a commonly used geometrical approach. The other method is the fast multipole method, usually used for boundary element methods, which is also applied for collision detection purposes here. Both methods are especially of interest when the collision for arbitrarily shaped polyhedra has to be detected. Here, both methods are described and compared for different examples of complex shaped polyhedra with up to 5 × 105 faces and more than 5 × 105 test points regarding efficiency and required calculation time.