Gaussian Splatting is my new favourite thing, so I hassled an ex-Epic artist to tell me everything he knows about the low-cost 'photo-real' rendering technique

I've just learnt what Gaussian Splatting is, and I fear it may become my entire personality. At the risk of oversimplification, Gaussian Splatting is a rendering technique that gives you 'photo-real' graphics at a fraction of the resource cost required by a number of other mainstream game development options. That fact alone is enough to encourage me to don the mantle of 'Gaussian girlie'—at least for this weekend column—and take a deep dive into the subject with an expert.

So, first things first, it's pronounced 'GOW-see-an,' and not 'GAWE-shun' as I have been saying for the last week. This is because it's derived from the name of the German mathematician that discovered them, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. Don't worry, I'm going to keep the maths to a minimum here—the passing GCSE grade I got over a decade ago has seen to that. But allow me to recap what sparked my splatting obsession about a week ago: specifically, this photorealistic FPS that runs ...