It's a lot easier to handle realtime in an editor than in a fully featured game. There's less other stuff going on, you can take extra shortcuts and usually rely on higher-end hardware.
> It's a lot easier to handle realtime in an editor than in a fully featured game. There's less other stuff going on
I don't think that's true. Most games are optimized to limit the number of draw calls and textures. The viewport of a 3D software package has no such limits. As a result, my viewport rarely runs as well as the games I play.
In any case, that's besides the original point, which was that it wouldn't need to run in realtime. My argument was that it would.
It's not a completely impossible goal. Look into what some artists are making with Dreams on the PS4. It uses raymarched SDFs for modeling.
