# AdR-Gaussian: Accelerating Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Radius

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08669 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08669/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [Splatter Image: Ultra-Fast Single-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13150/) (2023)
- [GaussianEditor: Swift and Controllable 3D Editing with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14521/) (2023)
- [Rodin: A Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Digital Avatars Using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06135/) (2022)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [MERF: Memory-Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-time View Synthesis in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12249/) (2023)
- [Point-Based Neural Rendering with Per-View Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02369/) (2021)
- [GES: Generalized Exponential Splatting for Efficient Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10128/) (2024)
- [Lightning NeRF: Efficient Hybrid Scene Representation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05907/) (2024)
- [Speculative Segmented Sum for Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on Heterogeneous Processors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06474/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [FastGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting in 100 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04283/) (2025)
- [3DGS2: Near Second-order Converging 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13975/) (2025)
- [Faster-GS: Analyzing and Improving Gaussian Splatting Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09999/) (2026)
- [When Gaussian Meets Surfel: Ultra-fast High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17545/) (2025)
- [Mobile-GS: Real-time Gaussian Splatting for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11531/) (2026)
- [TC-GS: A Faster Gaussian Splatting Module Utilizing Tensor Cores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24796/) (2025)
- [Turbo-GS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Fitting for High-Quality Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13547/) (2024)
- [PG-SAG: Parallel Gaussian Splatting for Fine-Grained Large-Scale Urban Buildings Reconstruction via Semantic-Aware Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01677/) (2025)
- [Gaussian On-the-Fly Splatting: A Progressive Framework for Robust Near Real-Time 3DGS Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13086/) (2025)
- [CompGS++: Compressed Gaussian Splatting for Static and Dynamic Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13022/) (2025)
- [Speeding Up the Learning of 3D Gaussians with Much Shorter Gaussian Lists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09277/) (2026)
- [Real-time Global Illumination for Dynamic 3D Gaussian Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17897/) (2025)
- [Time-resolved dynamic CBCT reconstruction using prior-model-free spatiotemporal Gaussian representation (PMF-STGR)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22139/) (2025)
- [Towards Next-Generation SLAM: A Survey on 3DGS-SLAM Focusing on Performance, Robustness, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04251/) (2026)
- [HiGS: A Hierarchical Rendering Architecture for Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00352/) (2026)
- [PS-GS: Gaussian Splatting for Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18231/) (2025)
- [A-TDOM: Active TDOM via On-the-Fly 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12759/) (2025)
- [Hybrid Latents: Geometry-Appearance-Aware Surfel Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14928/) (2026)
- [AdaGScale: Viewpoint-Adaptive Gaussian Scaling in 3D Gaussian Splatting to Reduce Gaussian-Tile Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18980/) (2026)
- [QuadBox: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting with Geometry-Aware Boxes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04844/) (2026)
- [Local-GS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Tile-Local Warp Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16566/) (2026)
- [DeGS: A Scalable 3DGS Architecture via Decoupled Workload Parsing and Reorganization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02099/) (2026)
- [CountingFruit: Language-Guided 3D Fruit Counting with Semantic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01109/) (2025)
- [Hi^2-GSLoc: Dual-Hierarchical Gaussian-Specific Visual Relocalization for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15683/) (2025)
- [3DGS2-TR: Scalable Second-Order Trust-Region Method for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00395/) (2026)
- [WebSplatter: Enabling Cross-Device Efficient Gaussian Splatting in Web Browsers via WebGPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03207/) (2026)
- [3DGS3: Joint Super Sampling and Frame Interpolation for Real-Time Large-Scale 3DGS Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11489/) (2026)
- [SparseOIT: Improving Order-Independent Transparency 3DGS via Active Set Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13855/) (2026)
- [TurboGS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error-Guided Sparse Pixel Sampling and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15924/) (2026)
- [Pocket-SLAM: Rendering-Area-Aware Pruning for Memory-Efficient 3DGS-SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24796/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a recent explicit 3D representation that has achieved high-quality reconstruction and real-time rendering of complex scenes. However, the rasterization pipeline still suffers from unnecessary overhead resulting from avoidable serial Gaussian culling, and uneven load due to the distinct number of Gaussian to be rendered across pixels, which hinders wider promotion and application of 3DGS. In order to accelerate Gaussian splatting, we propose AdR-Gaussian, which moves part of serial culling in Render stage into the earlier Preprocess stage to enable parallel culling, employing adaptive radius to narrow the rendering pixel range for each Gaussian, and introduces a load balancing method to minimize thread waiting time during the pixel-parallel rendering. Our contributions are threefold, achieving a rendering speed of 310% while maintaining equivalent or even better quality than the state-of-the-art. Firstly, we propose to early cull Gaussian-Tile pairs of low splatting opacity based on an adaptive radius in the Gaussian-parallel Preprocess stage, which reduces the number of affected tile through the Gaussian bounding circle, thus reducing unnecessary overhead and achieving faster rendering speed. Secondly, we further propose early culling based on axis-aligned bounding box for Gaussian splatting, which achieves a more significant reduction in ineffective expenses by accurately calculating the Gaussian size in the 2D directions. Thirdly, we propose a balancing algorithm for pixel thread load, which compresses the information of heavy-load pixels to reduce thread waiting time, and enhance information of light-load pixels to hedge against rendering quality loss. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly improve the Gaussian Splatting rendering speed.