FLICKER: A Fine-Grained Contribution-Aware Accelerator for Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting

TL;DR

FLICKER is a hardware-software co-designed accelerator that significantly improves the efficiency and speed of 3D Gaussian Splatting rendering on resource-limited edge devices by leveraging contribution-aware techniques.

Contribution

The paper introduces FLICKER, a novel contribution-aware accelerator for 3D Gaussian Splatting that reduces computational overhead through adaptive and hierarchical techniques.

Findings

Up to 1.5x speedup over state-of-the-art accelerators

2.6x improvement in energy efficiency

14% area reduction compared to existing solutions

Abstract

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a mainstream rendering technique due to its photorealistic quality and low latency. However, processing massive numbers of non-contributing Gaussian points introduces significant computational overhead on resource-limited edge platforms, limiting its deployment in next-generation AR/VR devices. Contribution-based prior skipping alleviates this inefficiency, yet the resulting contribution-testing workload becomes prohibitive for edge execution. In this paper, we present FLICKER, a contribution-aware 3DGS accelerator based on hardware-software co-design. The proposed framework integrates adaptive leader pixels, pixel-rectangle grouping, hierarchical Gaussian testing, and a mixed-precision architecture to enable near pixel-level, contribution-driven rendering with minimal overhead. Experimental results demonstrate up to $1.5\times$ speedup, $2.6\times$ improvement in energy efficiency, and $14%$ area reduction compared with a state-of-the-art accelerator. Compared with a representative edge GPU, FLICKER achieves a $19.8\times$ speedup and $26.7\times$ higher energy efficiency.