Point-based rendering techniques

The increasing popularity of points as rendering primitives has led to a variety of different rendering algorithms, and the different implementations compare like apples to oranges. In this paper, we revisit and compare a number of recently developed point-based rendering implementations within a common testbed. Also we briefly summarize a few proposed hierarchical multiresolution point data structures and discuss their advantages. Based on a common viewdependent level-of-detail (LOD) rendering framework, we then examine different hardware accelerated point rendering algorithms. Experimental results are given with respect to performance timing and rendering quality for the different approaches. Additionally, we also compare the point-based rendering techniques to a basic triangle mesh approach