OpenGL Point Rendering.

This page contains some new timings for the point rendering program used in the paper
"Hardware Accelerated Point Rendering of Isosurfaces".  The new timings have been
performed on an NVIDIA Quadro 4 graphics card using vertex programs to scale
the point size.

The main reason for repeating the timings is that the old timings were
made using a Geforce2 graphics card without vertex programs. Hence, point scaling
had to be done differently - in the way explained in the paper. Also, the primitive
generation timings turned out to be slower when creating (large) display lists. In
these tests, display lists are turned off.

The vertex program for point scaling is here

Platform

icc 7.0, Linux 7.3, Xeon 2.2 GHz, NVIDIA Quadro 4 900 XGL

Primitive generation timings

Primitive	BEAR	SKULL	ENGINE
Points Triangles Strips	0.9 6.7 37.4	3.8 13.5 1355.5	3.5 13.8 180.1
	seconds	seconds	seconds

Frames per second

Primitive	BEAR	SKULL	ENGINE
Points Triangles Strips	38.9 14.9 28.6	14.9 3.6 6.9	38.1 11.9 26.2

Conclusions are the same: It is faster to generate points and to render points. It will always be
 faster to generate points, since point generation is a subproblem of triangle generation. It can be
faster to render triangles, but, in general, point rendering becomes more and more attractive
the larger the models we have to deal with.