Splaxel: Efficient Distributed Training of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Reconstruction via Pixel-level Communication

We present BlitzGS, a distributed 3DGS framework that reduces active Gaussian workload for fast city-scale reconstruction. BlitzGS manages this workload at three coupled levels. At the system level, the framework shards Gaussians across GPUs by index parity rather than spatial blocks. This approach mitigates the cross-block visibility redundancy inherent in spatial partitioning. Furthermore, it distributes each rendering step through a single cross-GPU exchange that routes projected Gaussians to their tile owners. At the model level, scheduled importance-scoring passes shrink the global Gaussian population. During these passes, the framework generates a per-Gaussian visibility weight to bias density-control updates toward contributing primitives and a per-view importance mask for the view-level renderer. At the view level, BlitzGS trims each camera's active set with a distance-based LOD gate to exclude excessively fine primitives for the current frustum and the importance-based culling mask to skip Gaussians with negligible cross-view contribution. On large-scale benchmarks, BlitzGS matches the rendering quality of recent large-scale baselines while delivering an order-of-magnitude speedup, training city-scale scenes in tens of minutes. Our code is available at https: //github.com/AkierRaee/BlitzGS.

Training 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) at billion-primitive scale is fundamentally memory-bound: each Gaussian primitive carries a large attribute vector, and the aggregate parameter table quickly exceeds GPU capacity, limiting prior systems to tens of millions of Gaussians on commodity single-GPU hardware. We observe that 3DGS training is inherently sparse and trajectory-conditioned: each iteration activates only the Gaussians visible from the current camera batch, so GPU memory can serve as a working-set cache rather than a persistent parameter store. Building on this insight, we introduce TideGS, an out-of-core training framework that manages parameters across an SSD-CPU-GPU hierarchy via three synergistic techniques: block-virtualized geometry for SSD-aligned spatial locality, a hierarchical asynchronous pipeline to overlap I/O with computation, and trajectory-adaptive differential streaming that transfers only incremental working-set deltas between iterations. Experiments show that TideGS enables training with over one billion Gaussians on a single 24 GB GPU while achieving the best reconstruction quality among evaluated single-GPU baselines on large-scale scenes, scaling beyond prior out-of-core baselines (e.g., approximately 100M Gaussians) and standard in-memory training (e.g., approximately 11M Gaussians).

Gaussian splatting methods have become increasingly popular for neural reconstruction of the real world. However, they are often limited in scale and resolution due to compute and memory constraints. We present a multi-GPU Gaussian splatting approach that scales reconstruction to higher resolutions and larger scenes while abstracting away the code complexity typically associated with distributing a model. To accomplish this, we propose a PyTorch backend that distributes the Gaussian parameters and splatting operators across GPUs via CUDA unified memory and NVLink. Because distribution occurs at the operator level, the model code requires no explicit cross-device communication. More broadly, the backend exposes multiple GPUs as an aggregate PyTorch device and supports other PyTorch operators. We demonstrate city-scale reconstructions with street-level detail consisting of over 1 billion Gaussian splats, more than 25 times as many as the current state of the art.