# 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07090 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07090/

## Key facts

- Cited by 139 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [Free View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05511/) (2020)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16473/) (2023)
- [MERF: Memory-Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-time View Synthesis in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12249/) (2023)
- [A Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [Point-Based Neural Rendering with Per-View Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02369/) (2021)
- [Deblur-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from Blurry Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14292/) (2021)
- [Stable View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07233/) (2020)
- [Reducing the Memory Footprint of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17074/) (2024)
- [NeRFReN: Neural Radiance Fields with Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15234/) (2021)
- [RadSplat: Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real-Time Rendering with 900+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13806/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Shells for Efficient Neural Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10091/) (2023)
- [SMERF: Streamable Memory Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-Time Large-Scene Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07541/) (2023)
- [Approximate Differentiable Rendering with Algebraic Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10606/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Splatting on the Move: Blur and Rolling Shutter Compensation for Natural Camera Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13327/) (2024)
- [Flexible Techniques for Differentiable Rendering with 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14737/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 139)

- [FlashGS: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale and High-resolution Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07967/) (2024)
- [3DGUT: Enabling Distorted Cameras and Secondary Rays in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12507/) (2024)
- [Cosmos-Drive-Dreams: Scalable Synthetic Driving Data Generation with World Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09042/) (2025)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [EVER: Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering for Real-time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01804/) (2024)
- [Lyra: Generative 3D Scene Reconstruction via Video Diffusion Model Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19296/) (2025)
- [MILo: Mesh-In-the-Loop Gaussian Splatting for Detailed and Efficient Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24096/) (2025)
- [Efficient Perspective-Correct 3D Gaussian Splatting Using Hybrid Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08129/) (2024)
- [Sparse Voxels Rasterization: Real-time High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04459/) (2024)
- [EnvGS: Modeling View-Dependent Appearance with Environment Gaussian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15215/) (2024)
- [Radiant Foam: Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01157/) (2025)
- [RoboLab: A High-Fidelity Simulation Benchmark for Analysis of Task Generalist Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09860/) (2026)
- [MaterialRefGS: Reflective Gaussian Splatting with Multi-view Consistent Material Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11387/) (2025)
- [GeoSplatting: Towards Geometry Guided Gaussian Splatting for Physically-based Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24204/) (2024)
- [HiMoR: Monocular Deformable Gaussian Reconstruction with Hierarchical Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06210/) (2025)
- [Does 3D Gaussian Splatting Need Accurate Volumetric Rendering?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19318/) (2025)
- [7DGS: Unified Spatial-Temporal-Angular Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07946/) (2025)
- [VRSplat: Fast and Robust Gaussian Splatting for Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10144/) (2025)
- [GeoSVR: Taming Sparse Voxels for Geometrically Accurate Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18090/) (2025)
- [Faster-GS: Analyzing and Improving Gaussian Splatting Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09999/) (2026)
- [TransparentGS: Fast Inverse Rendering of Transparent Objects with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18768/) (2025)
- [6DGS: Enhanced Direction-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Volumetric Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04974/) (2024)
- [TokenGS: Decoupling 3D Gaussian Prediction from Pixels with Learnable Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15239/) (2026)
- [When Gaussian Meets Surfel: Ultra-fast High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17545/) (2025)
- [GaussianAnything: Interactive Point Cloud Flow Matching For 3D Object Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08033/) (2024)
- [Volumetrically Consistent 3D Gaussian Rasterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03378/) (2024)
- [GaSLight: Gaussian Splats for Spatially-Varying Lighting in HDR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10809/) (2025)
- [AAA-Gaussians: Anti-Aliased and Artifact-Free 3D Gaussian Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12811/) (2025)
- [6DOPE-GS: Online 6D Object Pose Estimation using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01543/) (2024)
- [LiDAR-RT: Gaussian-based Ray Tracing for Dynamic LiDAR Re-simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15199/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Particle-based representations of radiance fields such as 3D Gaussian Splatting have found great success for reconstructing and re-rendering of complex scenes. Most existing methods render particles via rasterization, projecting them to screen space tiles for processing in a sorted order. This work instead considers ray tracing the particles, building a bounding volume hierarchy and casting a ray for each pixel using high-performance GPU ray tracing hardware. To efficiently handle large numbers of semi-transparent particles, we describe a specialized rendering algorithm which encapsulates particles with bounding meshes to leverage fast ray-triangle intersections, and shades batches of intersections in depth-order. The benefits of ray tracing are well-known in computer graphics: processing incoherent rays for secondary lighting effects such as shadows and reflections, rendering from highly-distorted cameras common in robotics, stochastically sampling rays, and more. With our renderer, this flexibility comes at little cost compared to rasterization. Experiments demonstrate the speed and accuracy of our approach, as well as several applications in computer graphics and vision. We further propose related improvements to the basic Gaussian representation, including a simple use of generalized kernel functions which significantly reduces particle hit counts.