# BlitzGS: City-Scale Gaussian Splatting at Lightning Speed

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [A Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [Mini-Splatting: Representing Scenes with a Constrained Number of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14166/) (2024)
- [VastGaussian: Vast 3D Gaussians for Large Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17427/) (2024)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16553/) (2023)
- [Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/) (2024)
- [Capturing, Reconstructing, and Simulating: the UrbanScene3D Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04286/) (2021)
- [Speedy-Splat: Fast 3D Gaussian Splatting with Sparse Pixels and Sparse Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00578/) (2024)
- [FlashGS: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale and High-resolution Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07967/) (2024)
- [InstantSplat: Sparse-view Gaussian Splatting in Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20309/) (2024)
- [Compressing Volumetric Radiance Fields to 1 MB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16386/) (2022)
- [CityGaussianV2: Efficient and Geometrically Accurate Reconstruction for Large-Scale Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00771/) (2024)
- [On Scaling Up 3D Gaussian Splatting Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18533/) (2024)
- [FastGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting in 100 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04283/) (2025)
- [MaskGaussian: Adaptive 3D Gaussian Representation from Probabilistic Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20522/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TopoGS: Topology-Aware Anchor Feature Aggregation for Large-Scale 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27868/) (2026)
- [Gauss What You Need: Compact Gaussian Splatting Across Scene Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31248/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale 3D Gaussian Splatting underpins digital twins, simulation, and aerial mapping, yet city-scale training remains computationally expensive even with multi-GPU execution because every iteration must preprocess, communicate, and rasterize an overly dense set of primitives. At any given step, only a small fraction of these primitives contribute meaningfully to the loss; the rest incur redundant storage, communication, and rasterization costs. Existing approaches improve individual cost factors but do not fully address the underlying question: which Gaussians should be stored on each GPU, rendered for each view, and retained after early geometry formation? We present BlitzGS, a distributed 3DGS framework that reduces the active Gaussian workload at three coupled levels. At the system level, it shards Gaussians across GPUs by index parity rather than spatial blocks, mitigating the cross-block visibility redundancy of spatial partitioning, and distributes each render step through a single cross-GPU exchange that routes projected Gaussians to their tile owners. At the model level, it controls the population from both ends of densification. Scheduled importance-scoring passes prune redundant survivors, and a lightweight spawn gate withholds candidates predicted not to survive. The same importance signal also feeds back into density control. At the view level, a distance-based LOD gate and an importance-based mask trim each camera's active set. On large-scale benchmarks, BlitzGS matches the rendering quality of recent large-scale baselines while delivering nearly an order-of-magnitude speedup, training city-scale scenes in tens of minutes. Our code is available at https://github.com/AkierRaee/BlitzGS.