This for some reason reminded me of the "Killerspiele" debate [1] we had in Germany after a dramatic school shooting. The shooter had previously built a map of the school in Counter-Strike. With this it's not a long stretch from there to having a realistic map of a school... Which would have given him a better rating than the one he got for his map: "I'd like to see the school that actually has lighting like this." [2] Hopefully this tech will never used for something like this.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killerspiel [2] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/schuelerhobby-mapping-me...

I’m trying to understand from the video why this is better, it looks like a normal high resolution textures with precooked shadow maps.

It has no dynamic lighting or effects, which makes the video look like a high quality game from 2006.

Plays decently smooth on my M4 Max. It's probably still a long way from being a production-ready replacement for meshed environments, but I could imagine a hybrid mode where certain elements like grass and shrubbery are drawn with gaussians, perhaps with support for basic procedural animation. Great work with the playable demo!

Sort of unfortunate that one ends up putting normal meshed characters that clash with the photorealistic splat environment

I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen when gaussian splatting can be combined with DLSS 5. Gaussian splatting has a lot of potential in video games yet to be realised.