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arXiv · 2507.21499

SLTarch: Towards Scalable Point-Based Neural Rendering by Taming Workload Imbalance and Memory Irregularity

Xingyang Li·Jie Jiang·Yu Feng·Yiming Gan·Jieru Zhao·Zihan Liu·Jingwen Leng·Minyi Guo
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Abstract

Rendering is critical in fields like 3D modeling, AR/VR, and autonomous driving, where high-quality, real-time output is essential. Point-based neural rendering (PBNR) offers a photorealistic and efficient alternative to conventional methods, yet it is still challenging to achieve real-time rendering on mobile platforms. We pinpoint two major bottlenecks in PBNR pipelines: LoD search and splatting. LoD search suffers from workload imbalance and irregular memory access, making it inefficient on off-the-shelf GPUs. Meanwhile, splatting introduces severe warp divergence across GPU threads due to its inherent sparsity. To tackle these challenges, we propose SLTarch, an algorithm-architecture co-designed framework. At its core, SLTarch introduces SLTree, a dedicated subtree-based data structure, and LTcore, a specialized hardware architecture tailored for efficient LoD search. Additionally, we co-design a divergence-free splatting algorithm with our simple yet principled hardware augmentation, SPcore, to existing PBNR accelerators. Compared to a mobile GPU, SLTarch achieves 3.9$\times$ speedup and 98\% energy savings with negligible architecture overhead. Compared to existing accelerator designs, SLTarch achieves 1.8$\times$ speedup with 54\% energy savings.

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Xingyang Li, Jie Jiang, Yu Feng, Yiming Gan, Jieru Zhao, Zihan Liu, Jingwen Leng, Minyi Guo. 2025-07-29. SLTarch: Towards Scalable Point-Based Neural Rendering by Taming Workload Imbalance and Memory Irregularity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21499

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