HiGS: A Hierarchical Rendering Architecture for Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting
This work addresses the rendering bottleneck in real-time novel view synthesis for 3DGS, offering significant speed improvements for interactive applications.
HiGS introduces a hierarchical rendering architecture for 3D Gaussian Splatting that decouples partitioning and rasterization scales, achieving up to 15.8x speedup over original 3DGS and outperforming all evaluated rasterizers while maintaining exact alpha compositing.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the standard for real-time novel view synthesis on commodity GPUs. Its pipeline ties spatial partitioning and rasterization to one tile size, yet the two pull in opposite directions: partitioning, which bins and depth-sorts gaussians, grows cheaper with larger tiles, while rasterization gets cheaper with smaller ones. Prior acceleration work reduces the cost of individual stages but keeps both locked to that single scale, where a few dense tiles dominate frame time. We present Hierarchically Tiled Gaussian Splatting (HiGS), which gives each its own scale: partitioning runs over coarse macro-tiles, while rasterization runs over the fine render tiles within them. Rasterization work is then issued in proportion to the gaussians in each macro-tile rather than per tile, so dense regions spread across many parallel units instead of serializing through one. Across tested scenes, HiGS renders up to 15.8x faster than the original 3DGS and outperforms every other rasterizer we evaluate, while preserving exact front-to-back alpha compositing.