PlayCanvas Releases SuperSplat 3.0

PlayCanvas has released SuperSplat 3.0, a ground up rewrite of the browser based gaussian splatting editor that renders on WebGPU only. PlayCanvas brought a compute based WebGPU renderer to its engine in June, and that renderer fell back to WebGL 2 automatically where WebGPU was unavailable. SuperSplat 3.0 removes the fallback and the WebGL2 rendering path with it.

Splat projection, frustum culling, compaction, depth sorting and draw submission now run on the GPU every frame, through a compute projector, a GPU radix sort and indirect draw. The CPU sort worker is gone.

PlayCanvas measured peak JS heap on a 4.4 million splat scene loaded from a 990 MB PLY. At idle the figure falls from 1,557 MB on v2 to 105 MB on v3, a 1080p video render falls from 1,673 MB to 142 MB, and Publish falls from 1,934 MB to 741 MB. Saving a compressed PLY, the heaviest operation in the set, falls from 2,982 MB to 1,759 MB.

Stochastic Alpha is a sort free transparency mode that draws splats opaque and depth tested with per fragment coverage, so no sorted blend runs while the view is moving. The moment the scene settles, a fully sorted and blended frame is drawn, so the image at rest is exact. Spark shipped experimental stochastic rendering that skips explicit depth sorting in its Three.js renderer in August 2025. Preferences, Rendering, Stochastic Alpha exposes Disabled, Enabled, Movement and Auto, with Auto the default. Auto holds the sorted path until a sorted frame's GPU time measures slow, switches to stochastic during movement, and drops back when the view gets lighter.

Selection Depth, shortcut N, picks only splats on the visible surface, and Selection Footprint, shortcut M, tests whole gaussian footprints instead of splat centers. The two switches replace the old surface and through toggle, every 2D and 3D selection tool honors both, and footprint testing runs as a GPU intersect pass. Zero alpha splats are now selectable. A new 3D Sphere Brush on Shift+B depth picks each stroke sample to a world position, so the brush follows the surface of the scene, its radius maps to world size at the picked depth, and strokes split across depth discontinuities.

PLY, compressed PLY, SOG, SPZ, .ssproj and Publish all previously materialized the whole scene in memory before the editor wrote a byte. SuperSplat 3.0 streams each of them chunk by chunk through splat-transform 3.3.3, the converter whose own 3.0.0 rewrite made chunked streaming the default. Projects saved by 3.0 carry document version 1, which stores each layer's instance list alongside the shared static data. .ssproj arrived with SuperSplat 2.0 as a ZIP container holding JSON project data next to a PLY, and those version 0 documents still open in 3.0. The break runs one way, and a document written by 3.0 does not open in a 2.x build.

SuperSplat 3.0 requires WebGPU and runs in current Chrome and Edge, Safari 26 or later, and Firefox where WebGPU is enabled. Startup shows a localized message when WebGPU is unavailable instead of a blank page, and the 2.x editor is preserved on the v2 branch. The service worker and offline cache are removed, and a first load of 3.0 unregisters workers installed by earlier versions. The Centers/Rings mode toggle, the Show/Hide Splats toolbar button and the floating Colors popup are gone, replaced by an Appearance popup and a Tab key toggle for display overlays.

Orient tool point placement, which ran entirely on the CPU in SuperSplat 2.32, now picks on the GPU, and PlayCanvas reports a click on a 2.4 million gaussian scene dropping from roughly 8.5 seconds of frozen interface to under 25 milliseconds. SuperSplat 3.0 is built on PlayCanvas Engine 2.22.0.

SuperSplat 3.0 is available now for free.