Achieving ray-tracing physical accuracy with efficient rasterized Gaussian splatting

Establish whether rasterization-based 3D Gaussian splatting can attain physical accuracy comparable to volumetric ray-traced rendering of Gaussian primitives while preserving the high rendering efficiency characteristic of splatting-based pipelines.

Background

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable fast training and real-time rendering but rely on simplified, order-dependent alpha blending and approximations that limit physical correctness, particularly for overlapping semi-transparent objects. In contrast, ray tracing of Gaussian primitives provides physically accurate volumetric rendering but at higher computational cost.

Several works address these limitations from both directions—improving splatting-based methods to mitigate artifacts or adopting ray tracing for accuracy. The explicit open problem highlights the unresolved challenge of simultaneously achieving the physical accuracy of ray-traced approaches and the efficiency of rasterization-based splatting, motivating methods like MB3DGS that aim to bridge this gap.