Polygons are great because you can make a solid, closed surface. But, they are a pain because you have to maintain the connectivity between the vertices. Adding or removing polygons in a mesh is serious work. Especially doing so on a GPU. Most LOD schemes do heavy precomputation at data compilation time and have the GPU just view a sliding window into static results.
Splats however are loose points. It’s harder to get a solid appearance from them. But, you can add/remove/move each point independently.
Splats don’t really use neural techniques. But, they are well set up for neural techniques to work with them. Generating the splats from photos uses some sort of linear algebra optimization/back-propagation. The Gaussian aspect is required to enable that to work because gaussians are differentiable. Hopefully that means GS should fit in well with recent advancements in differentiable rendering.
Splats however are loose points. It’s harder to get a solid appearance from them. But, you can add/remove/move each point independently.
Splats don’t really use neural techniques. But, they are well set up for neural techniques to work with them. Generating the splats from photos uses some sort of linear algebra optimization/back-propagation. The Gaussian aspect is required to enable that to work because gaussians are differentiable. Hopefully that means GS should fit in well with recent advancements in differentiable rendering.