3DGauCIM: Accelerating Static/Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting via Digital CIM for High Frame Rate Real-Time Edge Rendering

Dynamic 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) extends static 3DGS to render dynamic scenes, enabling AR/VR applications with moving objects. However, implementing dynamic 3DGS on edge devices faces challenges: (1) Loading all Gaussian parameters from DRAM for frustum culling incurs high energy costs. (2) Increased parameters for dynamic scenes elevate sorting latency and energy consumption. (3) Limited on-chip buffer capacity with higher parameters reduces buffer reuse, causing frequent DRAM access. (4) Dynamic 3DGS operations are not readily compatible with digital compute-in-memory (DCIM). These challenges hinder real-time performance and power efficiency on edge devices, leading to reduced battery life or requiring bulky batteries. To tackle these challenges, we propose algorithm-hardware co-design techniques. At the algorithmic level, we introduce three optimizations: (1) DRAM-access reduction frustum culling to lower DRAM access overhead, (2) Adaptive tile grouping to enhance on-chip buffer reuse, and (3) Adaptive interval initialization Bucket-Bitonic sort to reduce sorting latency. At the hardware level, we present a DCIM-friendly computation flow that is evaluated using the measured data from a 16 nm DCIM prototype chip. Our experimental results on Large-Scale Real-World Static/Dynamic Datasets demonstrate the ability to achieve high frame rate real-time rendering exceeding 200 frames per second (FPS) with minimal power consumption—merely 0.28 W for static Large-Scale Real-World scenes and 0.63 W for dynamic Large-Scale Real-World scenes. This work successfully addresses the significant challenges of implementing static/dynamic 3DGS technology on resource-constrained edge devices.