how to enable glpoint smooth without enabling glblend or any transparency at all? is it possible?
i mean, i need nice, round points, but not transparent. when i disable blending points become awfully square…
only have blend enable while you need the smooth points. point smoothing should only affect things rendered as points (point mode enabled), but I haven’t looked at the spec in a while.
that’s right, it affect only points. that’s OK, but what should i do, when i need fully opaque big sized, round points, i mean with transparency set to 0…
now, even if i set glcolor4f(… , … , … , 1.0f) the points rendered are blended with other overlapping points, and with the background.
so, the thing is: i need points to draw as a nice big circles, with a color like with blending disabled.
maybe this is not possible at all? i know this sounds tricky 
in general, i need some method to draw a large geometry data set, around 650k vertices, and drawing this as points seems to be one of the fastest methods. or maybe you have some other ideas? point sprites? or maybe some other geometry, not points?
suggestions are welcome 
point sprites could do the trick if you used a texture that was transparent except for a circle. If you 650k vertices, points probably aren’t the best way to visualize it since it will get awfully crowded on screen. If you’re not planning on having the entire thing visible, break it up into large pieces so that you can detect what’s off screen before making opengl calls. Also, I’d suggest using vertex buffers or display lists to make the rendering faster. I’m not entirely sure what is faster to render, polygons or points (polygons require more fill, but vertex processing wouldn’t be any more difficult and graphics cards probably optimize more for them). Whatever you do, I wouldn’t use immediate mode with glBegin/glEnd, that will go too slowly for a data set of your size.
of course i am NOT using immediate mode 
currently i’m using DL but planning to switch to VBO.
[quote]If you 650k vertices, points probably aren’t the best way to visualize it since it will get awfully crowded on screen.
[/quote]
that’s true. especially, when point size increases, there is more blending to do (while blending is enabled) and that slows down rendering significantly.
one more thing comes to my mind: in 3dMark 2001 SE there’s one test that draws Stanford bunny and i think that point sprites are used for that. how is it possible to draw solid objects with point sprites? point sprites are just textured quads, aren’t they?