Engineers at Palantir’s frontend team faced a critical performance issue while building Zodiac, their custom 3D globe library. Standard map tiling methods failed near the poles, causing severe slowdowns. The problem emerged because traditional tiles, designed for flat maps, become impractical on a spherical surface. As users panned toward the Arctic, the system generated excessive geometry, crashing frame rates even on high-end machines.
The core issue lay in how tile areas shrink near the poles. A standard 5.625° × 5.625° tile covers 394,000 km² at the equator but only 24,000 km² at 84°N. This 16-fold difference meant the system created far more geometry than needed. To fix this, Palantir introduced polar scaled tiles, a new internal tiling format that adjusts tile size based on surface area rather than angular extent.
The solution uses the spherical surface area formula to calculate tile dimensions. Engineers wrote a function that merges standard tiles in polar regions to match equatorial tile areas. At zoom level 5, the top row near the North Pole now uses just 4 tiles, each spanning 16 standard tiles. Mid-latitudes use 32 tiles, while equatorial regions remain unchanged. This ensures consistent performance regardless of viewing angle.
The change required breaking from the standard quadtree model, where each tile splits into exactly 4 children. Instead, merged tiles allow smooth transitions between detail levels. The result is a 3D globe that maintains high frame rates even when zoomed into polar regions. This technical approach reflects Palantir’s focus on building systems that perform under real-world constraints, where network reliability and user needs vary widely.
Source: blog.palantir.com