WebSplatter: Enabling Cross-Device Efficient Gaussian Splatting in Web Browsers via WebGPU

TL;DR

WebSplatter is a GPU rendering pipeline for web browsers that uses WebGPU to enable efficient Gaussian splatting across devices, featuring a novel wait-free sorting method and dynamic geometry culling for improved performance.

Contribution

It introduces a wait-free hierarchical radix sort and an opacity-aware culling stage, addressing WebGPU limitations and optimizing rendering efficiency in web environments.

Findings

Achieves 1.2× to 4.5× speedups over existing web viewers.

Ensures deterministic execution across diverse hardware.

Reduces overdraw and memory footprint through dynamic culling.

Abstract

We present WebSplatter, an end-to-end GPU rendering pipeline for the heterogeneous web ecosystem. Unlike naive ports, WebSplatter introduces a wait-free hierarchical radix sort that circumvents the lack of global atomics in WebGPU, ensuring deterministic execution across diverse hardware. Furthermore, we propose an opacity-aware geometry culling stage that dynamically prunes splats before rasterization, significantly reducing overdraw and peak memory footprint. Evaluation demonstrates that WebSplatter consistently achieves 1.2$\times$ to 4.5$\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art web viewers.