Show HN: 100 Million splats, a whole town, rendered in M2 MacBook Air

https://twitter.com/AKurian001/status/1986979144014701026

by Arun_Kurian • 7 months ago

81 43 7 months ago

twitter.com

Written natively from scratch in Metal and Swift. Build for AirVis app.

tyleo• 7 months ago

The MacBooks have insane performance and everything else is falling behind.

It won’t be surprising if Apple overtakes Windows as a gaming platform in coming decades IMO if Intel can’t catch up.

honeycrispy• 7 months ago

Apple may have good hardware, but their software support is comically bad. Their support for backwards compatibility (aside from Rosetta) has basically been "FU, I'm apple", which you need for gaming.

Apple has had little to no interest in becoming a real gaming platform. Unless that changes, gamers will more likely be moving into the sweet embrace of Gaben on Linux.

latexr3• 7 months ago

Open the App Store on a iPhone. Of the four tabs, two are game-centric (“Games” and “Arcade”). Another (“Today”) has been consistently using more than half of its features for games.

In their most recent operating systems, they have released a separate app specifically for games (look at that domain, even).

https://games.apple.com

They created the Game Porting Toolkit.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

When they discontinue Rosetta next year, they’ll continue limited support specifically for old games.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

Plus, whenever they announce new chips they feature games and gaming personalities in the keynote.

Those are clear signs they are interested in gaming happening on their platforms. Whether they’re succeeding at it is another story.

realusername• 7 months ago

They'll never take the gaming segment as they would need proper backward compatibility.

No game developer want to update their game continuously just to keep the lights on.

The opposite is happening at the moment, they fell lower than Linux as a gaming platform.

sublinear• 7 months ago

I was under the impression the only reason the macbook was mentioned is that it normally wouldn't be able to render this so well.

Seems like a post about the software on display. i.e. "look it can even run on an m2 macbook air"

semi-extrinsic• 7 months ago

The Apple hardware is indeed very nice, but it's not a good environment for gaming. They've traditionally been quite gaming-hostile with refusing to support the later generations on OpenGL. Then there was a wrapper for Windows games called Whisky, but it was finicky and became unmaintained. Apple has their own App store which sells some games, which is in direct competition with Steam and others, so those actors are probably a bit wary of spending too much resources on the platform. Also a lot of gamer culture is related to building your own hardware, which Apple will never support.

Meanwhile gaming on Linux is becoming better than Windows these days, especially with all the trash to be circumvented on Win11, and Steam working hard on SteamOS etc.

bigyabai6• 7 months ago

I hate to break it to ya, but Apple Silicon isn't in the top 25 highest-performing consumer GPUs. It's probably not even in the top 25 most-efficient either: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

jiehong• 7 months ago

Neither is their target, they are more in the perf/watt segment.

rafram2• 7 months ago

That chart shows that M4 achieves 25% of the Geekbench scores of GPUs that pull >10x more power. That's definitely efficient.

lunaticlabs2• 7 months ago

The big advantage of macs when it comes to GPUs isn't their direct speed, its the unified memory model. If I want to buy a GPU that has 64-128GB of addressable memory, it will cost me an enormous amount and the computer itself will be a server module for racks that is loud and not a consumer PC. You can buy a mac with a unified memory model, and even though its GPU is not on the top rankings, the fact that it can operate on your model in regular memory is what gives it its advantages.

alsetmusic• 7 months ago

I'm a huge fan of Apple's hardware since they introduced their own silicon, but this is just silly. Apple doesn't have the personality needed to court and work with game companies. They're busy expecting everyone to come to them when they'd have to actually work to entice them.

tigranbs• 7 months ago

Is this the WOW effect of the hardware price-to-performance ratio? The only significant benefit I can see is that the M-series chips have RAM as GPU memory, which is slower than traditional GPUs, but at least you can run things with that memory.

zokier• 7 months ago

Here is the scene in browser. Runs plenty smooth on my 5 year old computer. https://splatter.app/s/lzs-xtl

Arun_Kurian4• 7 months ago

Ya Jakub really did an amazing job with Splatter, Martin and Will at SuperSplat also have something similar and works great. Only difference with us is that ours is light weight, native, support XR (VisionPro) and LOD structure is computed on load time, so you can load in any splat file within a couple of seconds.

unbelievably• 7 months ago

Is there some sort of level-of-detail going on to make this possible? I'd think that's the only way but the tweet says no preprocessing.

Arun_Kurian4• 7 months ago

Yup we compute the LOD structure on load within a couple of seconds using GPU compute shaders.

christkv• 7 months ago

Runs fine on my iphone 14

lifty• 7 months ago

Why can't they make video games with this tech?

deadbabe• 7 months ago

Will be a nightmare to license the use of all this data for commercial purposes. Each house, each building, requires consent.

Sorry, but the answer is no. Unless you are willing to pay.

segmondy• 7 months ago

prove it, under what law?

carlosjobim• 7 months ago

That's why Hollywood movies are so expensive. When they have a scene with spider man jumping around in New York, they have to pay a fee to every owner of real estate depicted in the scene.

Worst of all is of course space documentaries, where you can see the whole Earth. The licensing fees are horrendous.

thfuran• 7 months ago

Has anyone sorted out a good way to do dynamic lighting or animation with it?

Arun_Kurian4• 7 months ago

I think they are coming, should see a few pop up in 2026 for sure.

jncfhnb2• 7 months ago

Real world is a shitty map design

meffmadd• 7 months ago

From what I have heard „Bodycam“ uses scans of actual locations for its maps.

lunaticlabs2• 7 months ago

As a video game programmer, I can speak to this. For video games, we generally need geometry. Flat planes, things you can collide against, things we can reason about. Gaussian splats work as a bunch of 2D images stuck on top of each other, that in combination look correct. This is great for rendering, but makes it very very difficult/impossible to figure out whether you are inside some geometry or not, because it doesn't have any. it doesn't give you any way to reason about it as solid geometry. So in the end, you have to create the geometry that is the solid surfaces that you will collide against and move around in, and gaussian splats would be independent of that. Once you have all the geometry, its much easier to just render that.

There are tools that will generate geometry from splats, but its generally not very good, and gives messy results. Fixing the messiness is often more work than just re-doing it from scratch. This is another incredibly difficult problem that hasn't been solved particularly well.

jncfhnb2• 7 months ago

What’s the data?

Show HN: 100 Million splats, a whole town, rendered in M2 MacBook Air

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