North America's largest glass producer — formerly PPG Glass
Vitro Architectural Glass is the largest flat glass producer in the Western Hemisphere. It was formerly PPG Glass, and the product trademarks carried over unchanged — a drawing specifying PPG Solarban and one specifying Vitro Solarban call for the same glass.
Vitro sits upstream of everyone else in the chain. It manufactures the float glass and applies the coatings that determine how the finished unit performs. Fabricators then cut, temper, laminate and assemble; we install. By the time glass reaches a building it usually carries the fabricator's name, so most people never encounter the brand — but the coating doing the thermal work came from here.
One connection worth knowing straight away: Starphire is a Vitro trademark. If you have specified Starphire for a shower enclosure, a railing or a storefront, you have specified a Vitro product. See our Starphire page for what low-iron glass actually does.
Full technical data is on Vitro's website, which opens in a separate window.
Vitro's range organises into coatings and substrates — and the two combine, which is where most of the confusion comes from.
| Family | What It Does | Typical Use |
|---|---|---|
| Solarban | Solar control low-E, in double, triple and quad-silver tiers | The workhorse range for facades and commercial glazing |
| Sungate | Passive low-E — retains interior heat rather than rejecting sun | Cold-climate and passive-solar elevations |
| Starphire | Ultra-clear low-iron substrate | Showers, railings, displays, exposed edges |
| Acuity | Low-iron substrate, more economical than Starphire | Where clarity matters but budget is tighter |
| Optiblue | Body-tinted substrate | Where a tinted aesthetic is wanted |
A specification is normally a coating on a substrate: Solarban 70 on clear, or Solarban 70 on Starphire. Those two perform differently and look noticeably different, so the substrate is not a detail to leave off a quotation.
The Solarban range is tiered by how many microscopically thin silver layers the coating contains, and this is the single most useful thing to understand when comparing products.
Silver is what reflects infrared — heat — while staying transparent to visible light. Double-silver coatings gave good solar control with a neutral appearance and became the industry baseline. Triple-silver coatings, which Vitro pioneered commercially in the mid-2000s, reject substantially more solar heat at the same visible light level. Quad-silver, introduced a decade later, pushes it further again.
The reason this progression matters is that each additional layer lets you keep the glass looking clear while rejecting more heat. Before these coatings existed, the only way to control solar gain was tinting or reflective glass — which meant a dark or mirrored building. Multi-silver coatings decoupled appearance from performance.
The practical question on any project is which tier is needed to hit the energy target, because each step up costs more. On a north elevation a double-silver may be plenty; on a west-facing glass wall it will not be.
Three figures describe any coated glass, and a fourth tells you how good the coating actually is.
Visible light transmittance (VLT) is the percentage of daylight that gets through. Solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) is the fraction of solar heat admitted, where lower means cooler. U-factor is the rate of heat loss, where lower means better insulation.
The fourth is light-to-solar-gain ratio — VLT divided by SHGC. This measures selectivity: how much light you get per unit of heat. Anything above about 1.25 is considered spectrally selective, and the best modern coatings reach well beyond 2.
This is the number to ask for when comparing quotations, because it exposes the trade-off directly. Two products can both claim strong solar control; the one with the higher LSG ratio achieves it while keeping the space brighter. A dark tinted glass can post a low SHGC and a poor LSG ratio — it blocks heat by blocking everything.
Standard float glass contains iron oxide from the sand, giving a faint green cast. Face-on it is invisible; at an exposed edge or across a large pane it is not.
Putting a coating on a low-iron substrate rather than clear float typically gains a few percentage points of visible transmittance and produces a noticeably more neutral appearance. On a facade meant to read as genuinely clear rather than faintly green, that combination is the reason.
It costs more. Whether it is worth it depends on whether anyone will see an edge or compare panes side by side. On a shower enclosure or a glass railing, where edges are always visible, it usually is. On a punched window in a masonry wall, usually not.
Vitro offers two low-iron substrates at different price points, which is a useful option when the clarity matters but the budget will not carry the premium product across a whole project.
New York City has bird-friendly glazing requirements affecting new construction and certain alterations, and Vitro produces glass intended to address them.
Requirements depend on building type, the height of the glazing and the scope of work, so this needs checking against the specific project rather than assumed. Please verify the current requirement with your architect or code official.
The practical point is timing. Bird-safe glazing is a product selection made at specification stage — it involves patterns, frits or coatings applied during manufacture. It cannot be added to glass that has already been fabricated. If your project may be affected, raise it early or you will be replacing units rather than specifying them.
If you are working from older drawings or an existing building's records, you will often see PPG named. Vitro acquired the flat glass business and kept the product brands, so Solarban, Sungate and Starphire are all current products.
This matters most for replacement work on an existing facade. Glass from different production runs, and certainly from different manufacturers, varies subtly in colour and reflectivity — and on a single elevation with many panes, that variation is visible from the street, particularly on coated glass viewed at an angle.
Matching means identifying the original product rather than choosing something similar. Send us the original paperwork if you have it, or photographs of the elevation, and we can usually work out what is there and source the same thing.
We are not tied to one manufacturer, so we can price AGC, Guardian and Vitro against each other for the same performance target. Where a specification names a Vitro product, we quote that product; where we think an alternative genuinely suits the situation better, we will say so rather than substitute quietly.
What we need to give you a useful answer: the elevation orientation, whether there is an energy target or performance specification to meet, whether appearance is being matched to anything existing, and whether edges will be visible. Those four determine the coating, the substrate and whether the low-iron premium is justified.
See also Low-E glass, insulated glass units and architectural glass for how the coating fits into the wider assembly.
AGC Glass Guardian Glass Starphire Glass Low-E Glass Insulated Glass Units Curtain Wall Systems
Tell us about the opening and we will specify it for you.
