Remember when rendering millions of polygons required expensive workstations, specialized software, and a considerable amount of patience?
RenderMan veterans, this one's for you.
Someone just built a browser-based 3D scene containing almost TWO BILLION triangles, running at 60 FPS.
And the entire environment was created with the help of Claude Opus 5.5.
Meet BILLION, an impressive graphics experiment by Sara Chen (@sara_kumodeck), showcasing the new MeshletDrawingPipeline introduced in Three.js r187.
And the numbers are ridiculous.
1,967,478,960 triangles.
In a desktop browser.
At 60 frames per second.
So how is that even possible?
The secret is GPU-driven rendering using something called meshlets.
Instead of treating enormous 3D models as single objects, the new pipeline divides geometry into small clusters of 64 triangles.
Then the GPU decides which clusters actually need to be rendered.
Here's what makes Three.js r187 so interesting:
Meshlet rendering: Large meshes are divided into 64-triangle clusters.
GPU-driven culling: Invisible clusters are skipped before rendering.
Level of Detail (LOD): Distant geometry automatically switches to simplified versions.
Occlusion culling: Geometry hidden behind other objects can be excluded.
Indirect drawing: The GPU handles much of the rendering workload without constant CPU intervention.
WebGPU acceleration: Modern browser graphics APIs make these techniques possible.
And here's the really impressive comparison.
In the developer's demonstration:
Meshlets enabled: Approximately 60 FPS
Traditional rendering: Approximately 20 FPS
Same scene. Same hardware.
That's a threefold performance improvement in this particular test.
There's also a button to visualize individual meshlets, making it possible to see how the GPU organizes the scene.
And here's an important technical detail.
The scene contains nearly two billion triangles, but the GPU doesn't actually draw all of them every frame.
That's precisely the point.
Meshlet culling and LOD dramatically reduce the amount of geometry that needs to be processed.
The developer also reports that preparing the meshlets and LOD structures takes approximately 16–21 seconds on a desktop computer.
And if WebGPU isn't available, the demo falls back to a smaller WebGL2 version containing approximately 13.5 million triangles.
But here's what I find even more fascinating.
The entire canyon environment was generated procedurally.
No imported 3D models. No external textures.
Just code, mathematical noise, Three.js, and Claude Opus 5.5.
Which raises a rather interesting question.
What happens to traditional 3D production when powerful coding agents can generate complex environments directly in a modern rendering engine?
Of course, Blender, Maya, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and RenderMan aren't going anywhere.
Professional 3D production involves much more than generating geometry.
But for interactive experiences, procedural environments, browser games, and creative experiments, the combination of LLMs and modern rendering technology is becoming increasingly powerful.
And the barrier to creating ambitious 3D worlds keeps getting lower.
Almost two billion triangles. A browser. And an AI coding agent.
Not bad for something running in a tab.
Try the BILLION demo:
https://r187-meshlet.kumodeck.app/
Three.js r187 official changelog:
https://threejs.org/changelog/?r187
MeshletDrawingPipeline technical implementation:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/35191
Original creator:
https://x.com/sara_kumodeck
#ThreeJS #WebGPU #Meshlets #ClaudeOpus #3DRendering #CreativeCoding #VibeCoding
YouTube / ABVX