Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative

Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by Nekorosu on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:42AM (#50391167)

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.

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Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by kiwibyproxy on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:52AM (#50391255)

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

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Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by flohofwoe on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:01AM (#50391355)

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).

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Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by echoangle on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:39AM (#50391639)

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.

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Re:Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative by someguyiguess on Friday November 06, 2026 @08:25AM (#50392017)

Yeah in 480p

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