3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is an increasingly popular novel view synthesis approach due to its fast rendering time, and high-quality output. However, scaling 3DGS to large (or intricate) scenes is challenging due to its substantial memory requirement, which exceeds the memory capacity of most GPUs. In this paper, we describe CLM, a system that allows 3DGS to render large scenes using a single consumer-grade GPU, e.g., RTX4090. It does so by offloading Gaussians to CPU memory, and loading them into GPU memory only when necessary. To improve performance and reduce communication overheads, CLM uses a novel offloading strategy based on insights into 3DGS's memory access patterns. This strategy enables efficient pipelining, which overlaps GPU-to-CPU communication, GPU computation and CPU computation. Furthermore, CLM exploits these access patterns to reduce communication volume. Our evaluation shows that the resulting implementation can render a large scene that requires 102 million Gaussians on a single RTX4090 and achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. The code is open-sourced at: https://github.com/nyu-systems/CLM-GS

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is increasingly popular for 3D reconstruction due to its superior visual quality and rendering speed. However, 3DGS training currently occurs on a single GPU, limiting its ability to handle high-resolution and large-scale 3D reconstruction tasks due to memory constraints. We introduce Grendel, a distributed system designed to partition 3DGS parameters and parallelize computation across multiple GPUs. As each Gaussian affects a small, dynamic subset of rendered pixels, Grendel employs sparse all-to-all communication to transfer the necessary Gaussians to pixel partitions and performs dynamic load balancing. Unlike existing 3DGS systems that train using one camera view image at a time, Grendel supports batched training with multiple views. We explore various optimization hyperparameter scaling strategies and find that a simple sqrt(batch-size) scaling rule is highly effective. Evaluations using large-scale, high-resolution scenes show that Grendel enhances rendering quality by scaling up 3DGS parameters across multiple GPUs. On the 4K ``Rubble'' dataset, we achieve a test PSNR of 27.28 by distributing 40.4 million Gaussians across 16 GPU, compared to a PSNR of 26.28 using 11.2 million Gaussians on a single GPU. Grendel is an open-source project available at: https://github.com/nyu-systems/Grendel-GS

Weize Chen, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Hexu Zhao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.