Show HN: 100 Million splats, a whole town, rendered in M2 MacBook Air
39 comments
·December 15, 2025zokier
Here is the scene in browser. Runs plenty smooth on my 5 year old computer. https://splatter.app/s/lzs-xtl
Arun_Kurian
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.
tigranbs
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.
unbelievably
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_Kurian
Yup we compute the LOD structure on load within a couple of seconds using GPU compute shaders.
lifty
Why can't they make video games with this tech?
thfuran
Has anyone sorted out a good way to do dynamic lighting or animation with it?
meffmadd
From what I have heard „Bodycam“ uses scans of actual locations for its maps.
Arun_Kurian
I think they are coming, should see a few pop up in 2026 for sure.
jncfhnb
Real world is a shitty map design
deadbabe
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.
carlosjobim
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.
Arun_Kurian
wait... so what about Google Maps ?
segmondy
prove it, under what law?
christkv
Runs fine on my iphone 14
jncfhnb
What’s the data?
null
tyleo
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
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.
latexr
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).
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.
abtinf
And how about all the games no longer on the App Store?
Say, Flight Control (one of the first games to hit a million unit sales), or the Infinity Blade series (which wiki says was removed due to incompatibility with newer Apple platform changes)?
Induane
Of course they also took the route of inventing a new 3d api Metal which is at odds with Vulkan. There is HoneyKrisp of course, but if one want's decent gaming on an M1 or M2 laptop, Asahi Linux is actually the superior choice.
I don't think one can call it even close to success when the best way to run AAA games on your hardware is to literally replace the entire operating system which uses cobbled together components like FEX and wine/proton, etc... the fact that that works with more games is insane.
semi-extrinsic
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.
sublinear
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"
realusername
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.
alsetmusic
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.
bigyabai
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
Written natively from scratch in Metal and Swift. Build for AirVis app.