Vorion: A RISC-V GPU with Hardware-Accelerated 3D Gaussian Rendering and Training

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a foundational technique for real-time neural rendering, 3D scene generation, volumetric video (4D) capture. However, its rendering and training impose massive computation, making real-time rendering on edge devices and real-time 4D reconstruction on workstations currently infeasible. Given its fixed-function nature and similarity with traditional rasterization, 3DGS presents a strong case for dedicated hardware in the graphics pipeline of next-generation GPUs. This work, Vorion, presents the first GPGPU prototype with hardware-accelerated 3DGS rendering and training. Vorion features scalable architecture, minimal hardware change to traditional rasterizers, z-tiling to increase parallelism, and Gaussian/pixel-centric hybrid dataflow. We prototype the minimal system (8 SIMT cores, 2 Gaussian rasterizer) using TSMC 16nm FinFET technology, which achieves 19 FPS for rendering. The scaled design with 16 rasterizers achieves 38.6 iterations/s for training.