EVER: Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering for Real-time View Synthesis
Authors: name: Alexander Mai, name: Peter Hedman, name: George Kopanas, name: Dor Verbin, name: David Futschik, name: Qiangeng Xu, name: Falko Kuester, name: Jon Barron, name: Yinda Zhang

We present Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering (EVER), a method for
real-time differentiable emission-only volume rendering. Unlike recent
rasterization based approach by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), our primitive
based representation allows for exact volume rendering, rather than alpha
compositing 3D Gaussian billboards. As such, unlike 3DGS our formulation does
not suffer from popping artifacts and view dependent density, but still
achieves frame rates of sim!30 FPS at 720p on an NVIDIA RTX4090. Since our
approach is built upon ray tracing it enables effects such as defocus blur and
camera distortion (e.g. such as from fisheye cameras), which are difficult to
achieve by rasterization. We show that our method is more accurate with fewer
blending issues than 3DGS and follow-up work on view-consistent rendering,
especially on the challenging large-scale scenes from the Zip-NeRF dataset
where it achieves sharpest results among real-time techniques.