# Performance differences with POINTS between 1.11 and 2.0

**URL:** <https://discourse.processing.org/t/performance-differences-with-points-between-1-11-and-2-0/46959>\
**Category:** Coding Questions\
**Created:** [August 17, 2025, 3:34pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/performance-differences-with-points-between-1-11-and-2-0/46959 "2025-08-17T15:34:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![scudly](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.processing.org/scudly/32/5597_2.png) [@scudly](https://discourse.processing.org/u/scudly)\
**Post date:** [August 17, 2025, 7:04pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/performance-differences-with-points-between-1-11-and-2-0/46959/2 "2025-08-17T19:04:30Z")

</div>

I don’t have the answer to your question, so I apologize if this is going off on a tangent.

The most efficient way to renders large amounts of geometry is to bypass p5 or Processing and go direct to webgl / opengl using shaders. As an example, [https://infinitefunspace.com/p5/ball/](https://infinitefunspace.com/p5/ball/) animates 100,000 spheres without storing or passing any data between the CPU and GPU. Each sphere is ray-traced by the fragment shader onto a single triangle whose position and size are computed deterministically in the vertex shader based on the gl\_VertexID. You can see the source at [https://infinitefunspace.com/p5/ball/p5Ball.js](https://infinitefunspace.com/p5/ball/p5Ball.js).

If you need to position the geometry explicitly computed on the CPU, typically in opengl/webgl, you would pass positions to the GPU using vertex buffer objects which are a bit of pain to set up and can conflict with p5 or Processing. An alternative is to pass data to the GPU through textures. p5 makes this a bit easier using floating-point framebuffers. I have several p5 examples at [https://openprocessing.org/user/465377?view=sketches](https://openprocessing.org/user/465377?view=sketches) that also use shaders to compute the positions of the particles.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.processing.org/t/performance-differences-with-points-between-1-11-and-2-0/46959)._