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A 129FPS Full HD Real-Time Accelerator for 3D Gaussian Splatting (arxiv.org)
3 points by rbanffy 173 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A low-power chip renders 3D scenes for headsets by trimming away unneeded blobs and squeezing stored color detail, then painting the image in screen tiles. It shows full HD at 129 frames per second while beating earlier chips on size, speed, and energy use.

Abstract

Rendering large-scale, unbounded scenes on AR/VR-class devices is constrained by the computation, bandwidth, and storage cost of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). We propose a low-power, low-cost 3DGS hardware accelerator that renders full-HD images in real time, together with a hardware-friendly compression pipeline that combines iterative Gaussian pruning and fine-tuning, progressive spherical harmonics (SH) degree reduction, and vector quantization of all SH coefficients and colors. The scheme achieves a $51.6\times$ model-size reduction with a 0.743 dB PSNR loss. The accelerator uses a frame-level pipeline that integrates point-based culling and projection with tile-based sorting and rasterization, skips zero-Jacobian matrix multiplications (reducing processing elements by 63\% and computation by 53\%), and adopts comparison-free tile-based sorting with deterministic latency. Implemented in a TSMC 28-nm process at 800 MHz, the design occupies $0.66~\text{mm}^2$ with 1.1438 M gates and 120 kB SRAM, consumes 0.219 W, and delivers 1219 Mpixels/J at 267.5 Mpixels/s, enabling 1080p at 129 FPS. Overall, it is $5.98\times$ smaller in area, $5.94\times$ higher throughput, and delivers $7.5\times$ higher energy efficiency than prior 3DGS accelerators.

Fang-Chi Chang, Tian-Sheuan Chang
arXiv:2604.10223 · cs.AR, cs.GR, eess.IV · submitted Apr 11, 2026
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