Babylon.js has been one of the most active web engines when it comes to Gaussian Splatting. Version 9.0 introduced GS shadows, SOG compressed format support, and triangle splatting. Now, with the release of 9.1.0, the team is turning its attention to performance tuning, quality scaling, and bug fixes.
The most notable new feature is Downsampled Spherical Harmonics creation. Spherical Harmonics encode the view dependent color and lighting that give Gaussian Splats their photorealistic quality, but they come at the cost of memory. Babylon.js can now generate downsampled SH representations from existing splat data, giving developers a quality performance lever they can tune per use case. Pair that with a second new feature, runtime SH degree control, and web developers gain fine grained control over visual fidelity on the fly.
Beyond the new features, 9.1.0 addresses several bugs that affected 3DGS workflows. The GPU picker now correctly excludes inactive or hidden parts when raycasting in multi-part splat scenes, fixing incorrect selection behavior that had been tripping up developers working with segmented content. A quadratic time performance regression in addPart, the method used to build multi-part GS scenes, has been resolved. And a coordinate flip bug in the Viewer for SPZ-format files (Niantic’s compressed splat format) has been corrected, eliminating mirrored rendering that appeared when loading SPZ content.
The Babylon.js Viewer also no longer enables Screen Space Ambient Occlusion by default for all-splat scenes. SSAO is designed for polygon geometry, and applying it to Gaussian Splats produced dark halos and visual artifacts. Disabling it for pure GS scenes improves out of the box visual quality.
The full release notes are available on the Babylon.js GitHub.
