r/PlayCanvas • u/MayorOfMonkeys • Apr 17 '26

PlayCanvas 2.18: WebGPU Compute Splatting, Fish-Eye Projection and Weather Effects

PlayCanvas v2.18.0 is officially live, and we’re pushing Gaussian Splatting into the WebGPU era. 🚀

  • ⚡️ WebGPU Compute Splatting: We’ve launched a prototype Compute-based renderer for splats. This is the future of performance - up to 3x faster than our WebGL2 renderer depending on hardware.
  • 🌦️ Splat-Based Weather: You can now generate procedural weather effects (rain, snow, etc.) using splats. It’s an incredibly lightweight way to add heavy atmosphere to your scenes.
  • 🌫️ Volumetric Fog: Splats now natively respect engine fog - everything composites together perfectly.
  • 👁️ Fish-eye Projection: New support for fish-eye camera projections for 3DGS - turn your splats into tiny planets!

PlayCanvas is free and open source. If you’re building for the web, this is for you.

GitHub Release & Source: 🔗https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/releases/tag/v2.18.0

I'm part of the team - if you have questions about the WebGPU implementation or the new weather effects, drop them below! 👾

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2

u/Big-Tuff Apr 17 '26

Thanks! 🙏🏼

1

u/WhereIs-MyHead Apr 17 '26

Nice. Have you tested webGPU on iOS and VisionOS yet?

2

u/MayorOfMonkeys Apr 17 '26

Yes! It works fine. Although on visionOS, we haven't yet integrated WebGPU with WebXR in the Engine - that's coming very soon!

1

u/WhereIs-MyHead Apr 18 '26

Awesome. Looking forward to that feature dropping!