Graphics rendering that builds on machine learning and radiance fields is gaining significant attention due to its outstanding quality and speed in generating photorealistic images from novel viewpoints. However, prior work has primarily focused on evaluating its performance through software-based rendering on programmable shader cores, leaving its performance when exploiting fixed-function graphics units largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the performance implications of performing radiance field rendering on the hardware graphics pipeline. In doing so, we implement the state-of-the-art radiance field method, 3D Gaussian splatting, using graphics APIs and evaluate it across synthetic and real-world scenes on today’s graphics hardware. Based on our analysis, we present VR-Pipe, which seamlessly integrates two innovations into graphics hardware to streamline the hardware pipeline for volume rendering, such as radiance field methods. First, we introduce native hardware support for early termination by repurposing existing special-purpose hardware in modern GPUs. Second, we propose multi-granular tile binning with quad merging, which opportunistically blends fragments in shader cores before passing them to fixed-function blending units. Our evaluation shows that VR-Pipe greatly improves rendering performance, achieving up to a $2.78 \times$ speedup over the conventional graphics pipeline with negligible hardware overhead.

Reduced-precision data formats are crucial for cost-effective serving of large language models (LLMs).While numerous reducedprecision formats have been introduced thus far, they often require intrusive modifications to the software frameworks or are rather unconventional for widespread adoption across hardware vendors.In this paper, we instead focus on recent industry-driven variants of block floating-point (BFP) formats and conduct a comprehensive analysis to push their limits for efficient LLM serving.Our analysis shows that existing ultra low-bit BFP variants struggle to provide reasonable language model performance due to outlier values in blocks.To address the outliers with BFPs, we propose MX+, a cost-effective and non-intrusive extension designed for seamless integration into the microscaling (MX) formats.MX+ builds on the key insight that the outlier does not need to use its exponent field in the element data type, which allows us to repurpose the exponent field as an extended mantissa to increase the precision of the outlier element.Our evaluation shows that MX+ achieves significantly higher model performance compared to the 4-bit MX format (MXFP4) with negligible storage overhead and slowdown, thus offering a compelling alternative to MXFP4 or MXFP6 for efficient LLM inference.

This paper presents GSCore, a hardware acceleration unit that efficiently executes the rendering pipeline of 3D Gaussian Splatting with algorithmic optimizations. GSCore builds on the observations from an in-depth analysis of Gaussian-based radiance field rendering to enhance computational efficiency and bring the technique to wide adoption. In doing so, we present several optimization techniques, Gaussian shape-aware intersection test, hierarchical sorting, and subtile skipping, all of which are synergistically integrated with GSCore. We implement the hardware design of GSCore, synthesize it using a commercial 28nm technology, and evaluate the performance across a range of synthetic and real-world scenes with varying image resolutions. Our evaluation results show that GSCore achieves a 15.86× speedup on average over the mobile consumer GPU with a substantially smaller area and lower energy consumption.