# HiGS: A Hierarchical Rendering Architecture for Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

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

- [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)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [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)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)
- [EAGLES: Efficient Accelerated 3D Gaussians with Lightweight EncodingS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04564/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07090/) (2024)
- [RadSplat: Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real-Time Rendering with 900+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13806/) (2024)
- [StopThePop: Sorted Gaussian Splatting for View-Consistent Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00525/) (2024)
- [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)
- [3DGUT: Enabling Distorted Cameras and Secondary Rays in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12507/) (2024)
- [DISTWAR: Fast Differentiable Rendering on Raster-based Rendering Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05345/) (2023)
- [Efficient Perspective-Correct 3D Gaussian Splatting Using Hybrid Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08129/) (2024)
- [AdR-Gaussian: Accelerating Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Radius](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08669/) (2024)
- [Sort-free Gaussian Splatting via Weighted Sum Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18931/) (2024)
- [StochasticSplats: Stochastic Rasterization for Sorting-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24366/) (2025)
- [Faster-GS: Analyzing and Improving Gaussian Splatting Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09999/) (2026)
- [RetinaGS: Scalable Training for Dense Scene Rendering with Billion-Scale 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11836/) (2024)
- [Balanced 3DGS: Gaussian-wise Parallelism Rendering with Fine-Grained Tiling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17378/) (2024)
- [TC-GS: A Faster Gaussian Splatting Module Utilizing Tensor Cores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24796/) (2025)
- [GauRast: Enhancing GPU Triangle Rasterizers to Accelerate 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16681/) (2025)
- [Efficient Differentiable Hardware Rasterization for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18764/) (2025)
- [GS-TG: 3D Gaussian Splatting Accelerator with Tile Grouping for Reducing Redundant Sorting while Preserving Rasterization Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00911/) (2025)

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

- [From Splats to Silicon: Rethinking Computational Efficiency of 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06157/) (2026)
- [What Builds the Scene? Luminance Dominates Geometry Formation in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00749/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the standard for real-time novel view synthesis on commodity GPUs. Its pipeline ties spatial partitioning and rasterization to one tile size, yet the two pull in opposite directions: partitioning, which bins and depth-sorts gaussians, grows cheaper with larger tiles, while rasterization gets cheaper with smaller ones. Prior acceleration work reduces the cost of individual stages but keeps both locked to that single scale, where a few dense tiles dominate frame time. We present Hierarchically Tiled Gaussian Splatting (HiGS), which gives each its own scale: partitioning runs over coarse macro-tiles, while rasterization runs over the fine render tiles within them. Rasterization work is then issued in proportion to the gaussians in each macro-tile rather than per tile, so dense regions spread across many parallel units instead of serializing through one. Across tested scenes, HiGS renders up to 15.8x faster than the original 3DGS and outperforms every other rasterizer we evaluate, while preserving exact front-to-back alpha compositing.