Triangle splatting for real-time radiance field rendering

Conference item

The field of computer graphics was revolutionized by models such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting, displacing triangles as the dominant representation for photogrammetry. In this paper, we argue for a triangle comeback. We develop a differentiable renderer that directly optimizes triangles via end-to-end gradients. We achieve this by rendering each triangle as differentiable splats, combining the efficiency of triangles with the adaptive density of representations based on independent primitives. Compared to popular 2D and 3D Gaussian Splatting methods, our approach achieves competitive rendering and convergence speed, and demonstrates high visual quality. On the MipNeRF360 dataset, our method outperforms concurrent nonvolumetric primitives in visual fidelity and achieves higher perceptual quality than the state-of-the-art Zip-NeRF on indoor scenes. Triangles are simple, compatible with standard graphics stacks and GPU hardware, and highly efficient. Our results highlight the efficiency and effectiveness of triangle-based representations for high-quality novel view synthesis. Triangles bring us closer to mesh-based optimization by combining classical computer graphics with modern differentiable rendering frameworks. The project page is https://trianglesplatting.github.io/

Authors: Held, J; Vandeghen, R; Deliege, A; Hamdi, A; Rebain, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IEEE
• Host title: Proceedings: 2026 International Conference on 3D Vision 3DV 2026
• Pages: 1248-1257
• Place of publication: Los Alamitos, California, USA
• Publication date: 2026-05-27
• Acceptance date: 2025-11-05
• Event title: 13th International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV 2026)
• Event location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
• Event website: https://3dvconf.github.io/2026/
• Event start date: 2026-03-20
• Event end date: 2026-03-23
• DOI: 10.1109/3dv69130.2026.00123
• EISSN: 2475-7888
• ISSN: 2378-3826
• EISBN: 9798331573126
• ISBN: 9798331573133
• Language: English
• Keywords: 3d reconstruction; visualization; printing; Windows; neural radiance field; optimization; PSNR; rendering (computer graphics); timing; training; electrons; splatting; triangle; novel-view synthesis