# StochasticSplats: Stochastic Rasterization for Sorting-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24366 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24366/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03751/) (2025)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)
- [Shape, Light, and Material Decomposition from Images using Monte Carlo Rendering and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03380/) (2022)
- [Difix3D+: Improving 3D Reconstructions with Single-Step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01774/) (2025)
- [StopThePop: Sorted Gaussian Splatting for View-Consistent Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00525/) (2024)
- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [Inverse Path Tracing for Joint Material and Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07145/) (2019)
- [EVER: Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering for Real-time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01804/) (2024)
- [Neural Microfacet Fields for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17806/) (2023)
- [Don't Splat your Gaussians: Volumetric Ray-Traced Primitives for Modeling and Rendering Scattering and Emissive Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15425/) (2024)
- [Efficient Perspective-Correct 3D Gaussian Splatting Using Hybrid Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08129/) (2024)
- [Volume Rendering Digest (for NeRF)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02417/) (2022)
- [Sort-free Gaussian Splatting via Weighted Sum Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18931/) (2024)
- [Balanced 3DGS: Gaussian-wise Parallelism Rendering with Fine-Grained Tiling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17378/) (2024)
- [Transforming a Non-Differentiable Rasterizer into a Differentiable One with Stochastic Gradient Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09758/) (2024)
- [Deep and Fast Approximate Order Independent Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10197/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Triangle Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19175/) (2025)
- [Faster-GS: Analyzing and Improving Gaussian Splatting Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09999/) (2026)
- [Mobile-GS: Real-time Gaussian Splatting for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11531/) (2026)
- [Duplex-GS: Proxy-Guided Weighted Blending for Real-Time Order-Independent Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03180/) (2025)
- [Scaling Transformer-Based Novel View Synthesis Models with Token Disentanglement and Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06950/) (2025)
- [Speeding Up the Learning of 3D Gaussians with Much Shorter Gaussian Lists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09277/) (2026)
- [DiffSoup: Direct Differentiable Rasterization of Triangle Soup for Extreme Radiance Field Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27151/) (2026)
- [Power Foam: Unifying Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing and Rasterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24994/) (2026)
- [Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splattering for Mobile GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16298/) (2025)
- [Moment-Based 3D Gaussian Splatting: Resolving Volumetric Occlusion with Order-Independent Transmittance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11800/) (2025)
- [Depth Peeling for High-Fidelity Gaussian-Enhanced Surfel Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25345/) (2026)
- [HiGS: A Hierarchical Rendering Architecture for Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00352/) (2026)
- [Softmax-GS: Generalized Gaussians Learning When to Blend or Bound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27437/) (2026)
- [SparseOIT: Improving Order-Independent Transparency 3DGS via Active Set Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13855/) (2026)
- [CaT-GS: Efficient 3DGS Rendering for Large Scale Scenes via Inter-frame Caching and Tile Scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17842/) (2026)
- [From Splats to Silicon: Rethinking Computational Efficiency of 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06157/) (2026)
- [Ultra-fast Neural Inference for Stochastic Gaussian Splatting Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25604/) (2026)
- [SteadySplats: Resampling of Low-Variance Gaussians for High-Fidelity Stochastic Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05576/) (2026)
- [Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Scene Reconstruction: Methods, Systems, and Trade-offs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17513/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) is a popular radiance field method, with many application-specific extensions. Most variants rely on the same core algorithm: depth-sorting of Gaussian splats then rasterizing in primitive order. This ensures correct alpha compositing, but can cause rendering artifacts due to built-in approximations. Moreover, for a fixed representation, sorted rendering offers little control over render cost and visual fidelity. For example, and counter-intuitively, rendering a lower-resolution image is not necessarily faster. In this work, we address the above limitations by combining 3D Gaussian splatting with stochastic rasterization. Concretely, we leverage an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator of the volume rendering equation. This removes the need for sorting, and allows for accurate 3D blending of overlapping Gaussians. The number of Monte Carlo samples further imbues 3DGS with a way to trade off computation time and quality. We implement our method using OpenGL shaders, enabling efficient rendering on modern GPU hardware. At a reasonable visual quality, our method renders more than four times faster than sorted rasterization.