Performance and limits

Universe Map targets 60 frames per second on a modern desktop and 30 frames per second on mobile. A stable frame time is more important than displaying every available point at once.

How rendering stays bounded

• stars, exoplanet hosts, galaxy groups, and large structures use GPU point or line batches;
• no individual Three.js object is created for each large-catalogue record;
• camera-driven spatial indexes load only relevant star and galaxy tiles;
• textures and detailed object materials are loaded near their useful level of detail;
• orbital calculations update at a lower frequency and interpolate between states;
• labels have scale-, quality-, and collision-aware budgets;
• volumetric effects use quality-specific ray-marching and pixel budgets;
• the render loop runs outside Angular change detection.

Graphics profiles

Profile	Intended use	Typical reductions
Low	Phones, older laptops, battery saving	Fewer points, smaller textures, shorter ray marching, lower tile budget
Medium	Integrated GPUs and general use	Balanced density and post-processing
High	Recent desktop hardware	Richer catalogues, larger textures, denser volumes, more visual detail

The profile never changes the source coordinates returned by a catalogue or calculation.

Debug panel

Append ?debug=true to the URL to display runtime information such as frames per second, draw calls, triangles, geometries, textures, visible objects, current reference frame, camera distance, target, Julian Day, and graphics quality. When the cosmic-web scale loads the published Tempel catalogue, the panel also separates network fetch, Worker decoding and round-trip, main-thread geometry preparation, scene installation, the first visible render submission, and total time to visibility. Tempel data starts preloading in the nearby-universe view without adding geometry to the scene. The panel reports whether the cosmic-web activation reused that preload, how much lead time it gained, and the remaining activation-to-visible latency.

Example:

https://super-universe.app/?debug=true

Browser requirements

• JavaScript enabled;
• WebGL 2 support;
• enough GPU memory for the selected quality profile;
• pointer events for mouse, pen, or touch navigation.

If the renderer reports a performance warning, lower quality before reducing browser zoom. Browser zoom changes interface pixels; the graphics profile changes the actual rendering budget.

Known limitations

• the catalogue is extensive but not an exhaustive map of every known star or galaxy;
• object radii and some scale transitions are visually adapted;
• the Observable temporal mode is not yet a complete light-travel-time simulation;
• cosmological structure layers combine separate surveys with different footprints and selection functions;
• absence of a catalogue detection does not imply a physical cosmic void;
• detailed planetary surface navigation and live weather are outside the current scope;
• the black-hole effect is qualitative and does not trace general-relativistic null geodesics.

Troubleshooting

If navigation becomes slow, switch to Low quality, close other GPU-heavy tabs, and return to a known target. If a static dataset fails, reload once and inspect the browser network panel for the specific file rather than assuming the entire map is unavailable.

Next: Developer guide.