0+00Platform · Speed

Thirteen billion points, drawing in 0.6 seconds.

Every figure here was measured in Surveyor on public USGS 3DEP lidar of Lāna'i: 13,060,946,265 points in a single file, on named hardware, with the method written down so anyone can repeat it.

SurveyorWhole island to Lāna'i City in 30 s · real time

First frame: 0.6s2.3 s on the first launch of the day
Whole island, full detail: 6–8s14.3 s on the first launch
Flying: 100–118fpsMedian frame rate over five 45-second flights
Points a frame: 13.1MMedian; up to 45.4 M as detail streams in

1+00Open

The index first, the points as you look.

Opening reads the file's header and its index of 37,939 nodes, not its points. Surveyor's own log shows the metadata in 8 ms, the renderer ready at 108 ms and the dataset in place at 225 ms; the first frame follows, and the rest of the island streams in at full detail within seconds.

Open	Opened	First frame	Full detail
First launch of the day With normals, 162.6 GB	1.8 s	2.3 s	14.3 s
Second launch With normals, 162.6 GB	0.35 s	0.65 s	5.9 s
First open of that file Without normals, 108.9 GB	0.31 s	0.58 s	8.1 s

From the open command to the dataset's loaded event, to the first frame that drew points, and to the moment the whole-island view stopped loading. The first launch of the day also built the app's caches.

2+00Fly

Forty-five seconds, from the whole island to 375 m.

A recorded camera path starts 52 km out with the whole island in view and ends looking down from 375 m. Surveyor replayed it five times; every frame was counted against the wall clock.

Flight	Median fps	Average fps	95 % of frames under	Points a frame	95th pct	Peak	GPU a frame
First launch, flight 1	100	96	30.6 ms	13.1 M	28.6 M	45.4 M	2.7 ms
Second launch, flight 1	118	106	30.9 ms	13.1 M	28.3 M	45.4 M	2.7 ms
Second launch, flight 2	110	108	28.4 ms	13.1 M	28.3 M	45.4 M	2.8 ms
Second launch, flight 3	107	112	26.9 ms	13.1 M	28.3 M	45.4 M	2.8 ms
File without normals, flight 1	115	118	28.4 ms	13.1 M	27.0 M	42.6 M	2.7 ms

Median and average frames per wall-clock second over each 45.5-second flight; frame and GPU times from Surveyor's per-frame telemetry. Surveyor's default point budget is 24 million points a frame; frames above it are the moments new detail arrives.

The whole island of Lāna'i coloured by elevation in Surveyor — The whole island, by elevation

Lāna'i City by lidar intensity in Surveyor — Lāna'i City, by intensity

Sea cliffs on Lāna'i in shaded relief in Surveyor — Sea cliffs, shaded relief

3+00Convert

From 1,569 tiles to one file.

The same converter Surveyor uses turned the 1,569 LAZ tiles into one .pgc2, without a single GPU error.

Conversion	Points	Time	Rate
Without normals	13,060,946,265	84 min	2.58 M/s
With normals, planarity and linearity on the GPU	13,060,946,265	4 h 31 min	0.80 M/s

Converted in July 2026 on the same machine; times from the converter's own timing log.

4+00Plan sets

A 305 MB plan set, opened from 9 MB.

Puck reads large PDFs in ranges instead of loading the whole file: a 124-page, 305 MB plan set opened after reading about 9 MB of it.

5+00Method

How we measured.

Data: USGS 3DEP project HI_NOAAMauiOahu_2020_B20, the 1,569 LAZ tiles covering Lāna'i (public domain), converted to .pgc2 in metres, EPSG:6634.
Machine: Dell PowerEdge R740xd: two Intel Xeon Gold 6132 processors (56 threads), 766 GiB of RAM, NVIDIA RTX A4000 with 16 GB, NVMe storage, Windows Server 2025.
Display: Surveyor maximised on a 1920 × 1080 display, over Remote Desktop, in its default layout: a 3D view of about 1568 × 669 pixels beside the sidebar and results panel.
Build: Surveyor as built on 15 October 2026, default settings, in a fresh profile.
Camera path: A 45.4-second path recorded in Surveyor, replayed with the same interpolation as Surveyor's own player, one camera update per animation frame, smoothing off.
Counting: Surveyor's per-frame engine telemetry, one record per frame; frame rate counted per wall-clock second. Measured on 17 October 2026.

Platform