100 Million splats, a whole town, rendered in M2 MacBook Air
Details
- External ID
- 46277477
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- 100 Million splats, a whole town, rendered in M2 MacBook Air
- Website domain
- twitter.com
- Launched
- Dec. 15, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 81
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8683206106870229
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Written natively from scratch in Metal and Swift. Build for AirVis app.
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS and desktop customization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- graphics rendering benchmark for m2 macbook air
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Rendering 100 million 3D Gaussian splats in real-time on consumer hardware without preprocessing requires deep expertise in GPU architecture, Metal shading language, spatial data structures, and custom sorting/rasterization pipelines.
What it would actually take: Building this engine requires an expert graphics and systems engineer proficient in Apple Metal, Metal Shading Language (MSL), and Swift. The technical core involves writing custom GPU compute kernels for radix sorting of 100M primitives per frame, view frustum culling, tiled rasterization, and memory streaming tailored to Apple's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) to avoid VRAM exhaustion. It demands deep understanding of modern 3D Gaussian Splatting algorithms (Kerbl et al.) and hardware-level cache optimization.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Google Maps, Bodycam (location scanning), Splatter, SuperSplat
Concerns raised: Gaussian splats lack solid geometry for collision detection in games, Converting splats to geometry produces messy results, often worse than starting from scratch, Apple GPU raster performance lacking compared to competitors, Apple doesn't publish GPU TDP specifications for accurate power comparisons, Difficult to implement dynamic lighting and animation with splats
Feature requests: Better tools for generating usable game geometry from gaussian splats, Dynamic lighting and animation support, LOD (level of detail) structure optimization
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 29 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #9 of 30 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
- Immersive Gaussian Splat tour of grace cathedral, San Francisco · hn · 2026-07-20 · 263 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Turning a Gaussian Splat into a videogame · hn · 2026-04-23 · 236 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- stratum · github · 2026-09-18 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Ambient · github · 2026-09-13 · 233 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Flight-Viz · hn · 2026-04-01 · 101 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- code-map · github · 2026-09-17 · 48 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- tars · github · 2026-09-16 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Apple-Tiles · github · 2026-09-27 · 29 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.