AbacusGS: Gaussian Splatting without Per-Splat Sorting

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting sorts every splat by depth in every frame. Viewers that draw splats with the hardware rasterizer and sort them on the CPU, as most web and mobile viewers do, spend most of the frame time in this sort. We present AbacusGS, which stores the blending order of a 3DGS scene in the scene layout. AbacusGS groups the splats into octree boxes of at most 128 splats and stores each box in order along an axis chosen at write time. In each frame, AbacusGS sorts only the visible boxes, and one dot product per box decides whether the box is read forward or backward. A short order-aware fine-tuning converts an existing 3DGS model, and the over operator of 3DGS stays unchanged. On 13 standard scenes, AbacusGS loses 0.13 dB PSNR on average against an equally fine-tuned 3DGS model. In an OpenGL viewer that orders splats on the CPU, AbacusGS renders frames 4.5 times faster than per-splat sorting. We also present a compact format of 17 bytes per splat and a CUDA tile renderer that use the same order. The code will be released.