# GRTX: Efficient Ray Tracing for 3D Gaussian-Based Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20429 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20429/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [MobileNeRF: Exploiting the Polygon Rasterization Pipeline for Efficient Neural Field Rendering on Mobile Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00277/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [VR-GS: A Physical Dynamics-Aware Interactive Gaussian Splatting System in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16663/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07090/) (2024)
- [StopThePop: Sorted Gaussian Splatting for View-Consistent Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00525/) (2024)
- [Instant-3D: Instant Neural Radiance Field Training Towards On-Device AR/VR 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12467/) (2023)
- [EVER: Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering for Real-time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01804/) (2024)
- [Don't Splat your Gaussians: Volumetric Ray-Traced Primitives for Modeling and Rendering Scattering and Emissive Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15425/) (2024)
- [MetaSapiens: Real-Time Neural Rendering with Efficiency-Aware Pruning and Accelerated Foveated Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00435/) (2024)
- [Cicero: Addressing Algorithmic and Architectural Bottlenecks in Neural Rendering by Radiance Warping and Memory Optimizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11852/) (2024)
- [RayGauss: Volumetric Gaussian-Based Ray Casting for Photorealistic Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03356/) (2024)
- [Hardware Acceleration of Neural Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05735/) (2023)
- [GCC: A 3DGS Inference Architecture with Gaussian-Wise and Cross-Stage Conditional Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15300/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Blending Unit: An Edge GPU Plug-in for Real-Time Gaussian-Based Rendering in AR/VR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23625/) (2025)
- [RTNN: Accelerating Neighbor Search Using Hardware Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01366/) (2022)
- [VR-Pipe: Streamlining Hardware Graphics Pipeline for Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17078/) (2025)
- [FlexNeRFer: A Multi-Dataflow, Adaptive Sparsity-Aware Accelerator for On-Device NeRF Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06504/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [3D Gaussian Accelerated Ray Tracing: Fast training through particle-based backward propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17298/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting has gained widespread adoption across diverse applications due to its exceptional rendering performance and visual quality. While most existing methods rely on rasterization to render Gaussians, recent research has started investigating ray tracing approaches to overcome the fundamental limitations inherent in rasterization. However, current Gaussian ray tracing methods suffer from inefficiencies such as bloated acceleration structures and redundant node traversals, which greatly degrade ray tracing performance. In this work, we present GRTX, a set of software and hardware optimizations that enable efficient ray tracing for 3D Gaussian-based rendering. First, we introduce a novel approach for constructing streamlined acceleration structures for Gaussian primitives. Our key insight is that anisotropic Gaussians can be treated as unit spheres through ray space transformations, which substantially reduces BVH size and traversal overhead. Second, we propose dedicated hardware support for traversal checkpointing within ray tracing units. This eliminates redundant node visits during multi-round tracing by resuming traversal from checkpointed nodes rather than restarting from the root node in each subsequent round. Our evaluation shows that GRTX significantly improves ray tracing performance compared to the baseline ray tracing method with a negligible hardware cost.