Feature Overview
Myth delivers modern rendering capabilities rivaling heavyweight commercial engines while staying lightweight. This page gives a bird's-eye view of the engine's core capabilities to help you quickly decide whether it fits your project.
Capability Matrix
| Domain | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Core Architecture | SSA-based declarative RenderGraph compiler, zero-allocation per-frame rebuild, automatic memory aliasing, dead-pass elimination |
| Cross-platform | Windows / macOS / Linux / iOS / Android · WebGPU/WASM · Python bindings |
| Backend | Built on wgpu — Vulkan / Metal / DX12 / WebGPU |
| Lighting | Clustered forward lighting, Image-Based Lighting (IBL), Cascaded Shadow Maps (CSM), spot-light shadows |
| Materials | Full PBR (Clearcoat / Iridescence / Transmission / Sheen / Anisotropy), Phong, Unlit, custom material macro |
| Screen-Space FX | SSAO, SSR, SSGI, SSSS (subsurface scattering) |
| Post-Processing | HDR pipeline, Bloom, color grading, TAA / FXAA / MSAA, CAS sharpening |
| Environment | Procedural sky (Hillaire 2020 atmospheric scattering), sun/moon/stars, day-night cycle, skybox, HDR environment maps |
| 3DGS | GPU-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting, unified with the PBR pipeline |
| Assets | Full glTF 2.0 (PBR, animation, morph targets), asynchronous asset system |
| Tooling | Embedded egui inspector, runtime RenderGraph topology dump |
| Offscreen | Headless rendering, non-blocking GPU→CPU readback ring buffer |
Design Trade-offs
Myth's goal is not to be yet another "batteries-included" engine, but a focused, embeddable, customizable high-performance rendering core.
- Focused on rendering: We concentrate on the graphics pipeline itself. Physics, audio, and networking are left to your choice — the engine imposes no architecture on you.
- Embeddable: The engine can run windowless, or embed into existing winit / egui / custom event loops, making it ideal for editors, visualization tools, or server-side rendering.
- Compiler mindset: Rendering is modeled as a graph-compilation problem. You declare topological needs; the compiler handles scheduling, synchronization, and memory reuse — leaving the complexity to the compiler and the creativity to you.
Render Paths at a Glance
The engine offers two main render paths, selectable via RendererSettings when creating an App:
RenderPath::HighFidelity: The full PBR + post-processing + screen-space FX + 3DGS pipeline. Most features (Bloom, SSAO, SSR, SSGI, TAA, 3DGS, etc.) depend on this path.RenderPath::BasicForward: Minimal forward rendering, suited to low-end devices or scenes that only need basic shading.
See Render Paths & Frame Composer for details.
Next Steps
- Ready to dive in? → Quick Start
- Want the engine's mental model? → Scene & Node System
- Want to go deep on the architecture? → Render Graph