Points Reloaded: Point-Based Rendering Revisited

The increasing popularity of points as rendering primitives has led to a variety of different rendering algorithms, and in particular the different implementations compare like apples to oranges. In this paper we revisit a number of recently developed point-based rendering implementations. We briefly summarize a few proposed hierarchical multiresolution point data structures and their advantages. Based on a common multiresolution framework we then describe and examine different hardware accelerated point rendering algorithms. Experimental results are given with respect to performance timing and rendering quality for the different approaches.