GSCore: Efficient Radiance Field Rendering via Architectural Support for 3D Gaussian Splatting

This paper presents GSCore, a hardware acceleration unit that efficiently executes the rendering pipeline of 3D Gaussian Splatting with algorithmic optimizations. GSCore builds on the observations from an in-depth analysis of Gaussian-based radiance field rendering to enhance computational efficiency and bring the technique to wide adoption. In doing so, we present several optimization techniques, Gaussian shape-aware intersection test, hierarchical sorting, and subtile skipping, all of which are synergistically integrated with GSCore. We implement the hardware design of GSCore, synthesize it using a commercial 28nm technology, and evaluate the performance across a range of synthetic and real-world scenes with varying image resolutions. Our evaluation results show that GSCore achieves a 15.86× speedup on average over the mobile consumer GPU with a substantially smaller area and lower energy consumption.