Splats under Pressure: Exploring Performance-Energy Trade-offs in Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting under Constrained GPU Budgets

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) represents scenes with explicit primitives and supports real-time novel-view synthesis, yet its system efficiency varies substantially across scenes, viewpoints, rendering paths, and platform constraints. Existing studies pursue efficiency through representation and algorithm design, GPU runtime optimization, and architectural support, but their reported gains correspond to different points along the rendering and update paths. Connecting these indicators to end-to-end system benefit requires tracing how each optimization changes Gaussian selection, screen-space work, data movement, and stage or frame time. We therefore use a workload-centric framework to connect representation and algorithm research, GPU runtimes, and hardware architectures and to identify recurring workload patterns. We complement literature analysis with reproduced measurements and controlled GPU profiling of selected implementations, relating workload counts to stage time and memory traffic. Together, these comparisons show that system gains depend on workload reductions reaching downstream execution, granularity matching each stage, and the cost of data transfers, synchronization, and cached results, gradients, and optimizer data. Building on these findings, we discuss more consistent evaluation under rendering-quality constraints and identify key directions for future system design.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for novel view synthesis, combining high-quality reconstruction with efficient rendering. It has been widely adopted in domains such as AR/VR, robotics, and autonomous driving. However, achieving real-time performance on resource-constrained platforms remains challenging due to strict power and area budgets. Prior accelerators improve hardware performance but still overlook key inefficiencies, including insufficient rasterization efficiency, poor sorting scalability, and pipeline imbalance. This paper presents an architecture-algorithm co-design to address these challenges. First, we propose axis-shared rasterization, which precomputes and reuses common terms along the X- and Y-axes, reducing multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations by up to 38% while preserving high parallelism. Second, we develop a novel order-independent transmittance method that removes the need for explicit sorting by leveraging a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) to directly approximate the transmittance of each Gaussian, enabling efficient alpha blending with negligible quality loss. Third, we design a unified reconfigurable PE array that supports both rasterization and MLP inference, sustaining high utilization without costly sorting hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that our design preserves rendering quality while achieving a 1.33 to 1.88x speedup over state-of-the-art 3DGS accelerators. Our code is open source at https://github.com/WangZhican/ISCA26_3DGS_Acc.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time novel-view synthesis but remains limited on GPUs at high resolutions. Through a stage-wise Roofline characterization, we identify two distinct hardware bottlenecks: global memory traffic dominates the front end, whereas instruction throughput limits rasterization. Guided by this analysis, we develop RoofGS, a rendering framework that applies bottleneck-specific optimizations rather than generic kernel acceleration. For the memory-bound front end, we design a resolution-adaptive quantized depth sorting key that compresses each key to 32 bits. For the compute-bound rasterizer, we introduce a range-aware bit-level fast exponential approximation tailored to the bounded exponent range after opacity culling, with a derived per-pixel error bound. These two core techniques are complemented by additional optimizations (kernel fusion, compact attribute storage, culling, dual-pixel evaluation) that additionally reduce memory traffic and improve instruction-level parallelism. Experiments show that RoofGS achieves a 10.1$\times$ end-to-end speedup over 3DGS at 4K on an RTX 4090, increasing throughput from 61 to 616 FPS, with only a 0.028 dB PSNR loss.