I am currently in the process of revamping an outdated visualization created a few years back using an earlier version of Three.js
. The visualization consists of approximately 20,000 2D circles (nodes from a graph) displayed on a screen with predetermined positions and colors.
There is no animation involved except when there is user interaction (such as zooming or clicking). The previous developer utilized sprites to represent different states of the circles (e.g. glowing effect for selected nodes, transparency for hidden nodes).
I have managed to replicate much of the visualization by utilizing CircleBufferGeometry
instead of sprites.
While I understand that this question may be too specific to my project, I am curious to know if rendering ~20,000 sprites or ~20,000 instances of CircleBufferGeometry
is more efficient in terms of performance with Three.js / webgl.
Appreciate any insights you may have!