I was going to highlight the same thing. M1 is very powerful and this kind of application would be more limited by the amount of unified RAM. If it works well on 8Gb it's a good one. Mentioning M1 like this actually makes the app look bad.

did you check out the page? this features a "flying mode" in 3D terrain, streamable to Vision Pro

It's still doing nothing that a 20 year old flight simulator wouldn't be able to do. The one potential performance problem on a laptop with HighDPI display might be the pixel fillrate to render at full resolution, but the pixel shaders in Google Earth should be extremely cheap, and if that's not enough it could drop down to half resolution with 4x MSAA without much quality loss (but an M1 GPU easily has enough oompfh per pixel on a Retina displays for what Google Earth needs to render).

FSX from 2006 had 3D terrain you could fly over and streaming to a VR headset isn’t that hard either. An oculus Quest has effectively mobile phone power and can run VR games on device.

Yeah in 480p

There's a ton of single threaded performance problems in Google Earth Pro if you watch its activity closely, when you have something like 150MB-300MB of KML placemark lat/long locations and lines loaded. Moving to a new geographic area will cause it to re-read the entire KML for an area and render the placemarks/lines onto the map using *only one CPU core* no matter the capability of your system. There's tons of other things it does with only one core.

Load the fiber maps for a facilities based ISP that spans a few county size up to a whole state size of scale, with good granular detail (like splice case and pedestal locations, etc) and watch Google Earth Pro slow to an absolute crawl even on a $599 current gen Intel core-whatever or AMD Ryzen single socket workstation CPU.

To be fair to it, people are trying to do all kinds of things these days with KML files that it really wasn't designed for, or ever intended for, and are much better done with professional grade GIS software.

[delayed]

For agents, M1s are the ancient machines, made long before they were born, and, the horror, barely enough to provide enough nutrients to even a small LLM.

> even a small LLM

So, a medium language model?

There is a Netflix miniseries about how two underdog hackers built the first Google Earth precursor in 1994(!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code

(IIRC the premise was that the underdogs invented something Mipmaps, which I found hard to believe. The core tech was probably already invented by 3d shooters at that time)

It's not the same mipmapping that games use really, but dividing the map data into a quadtree with progressively finer resolutions.

It's more like turning mipmapping into a paging system.

Fun fact: The author of Kugelblitz, Tim Pritlove, worked for Art+Com which developed the Google Earth precursor TerraVision you mentioned.

In the earliest days it required expensive GPUs to run well.

I remember that day, 25 years ago, when my dad showed me Google Earth on a Dell Dimension desktop with a Pentium 4 processor. I actually remember the experience pretty clearly. The globe rendered smoothly (at 1024x768) but our internet connection was so slow that it took about 10 seconds for each new step of image resolution to pop in.

Right? Bloat is slightly more aggressive than Moore’s Law!