I suppose the big pros are that it's a fairly simple representation - no connectivity information to worry about (between points, as in triangles), no uv mapping to worry about. They can be a good representation for certain effects - particle systems are basically point clouds I guess, so for things like smoke, clouds etc. Things like CSG are very easy with point clouds compared to polygons. Dreams uses a point cloud representation for example (alongside an implicit representation). Certain things can be done pretty easily with point clouds compared to polygons - dynamic LoD is a matter of just dropping points. Certain effects might come relatively 'free' like DoF, depending on how you render your point cloud. I guess one of the biggest benefits is that getting a point cloud representation of real objects, from either LIDAR or photogrammetry or the like, is 'easy'. You can readily scan objects into point clouds and get super highly detailed, 'photo-real', models - if you can render them. And that scanning is cheap compared to manual production.



Which leads to the downside - without an implicit companion representation (as in Dreams), they're huge data hogs. Rendering them has challenges - you need to do hole filling. GPUs are obviously not targeted at point rendering specifically. So much middleware is built around polygons - like physics for example. So even if you're using point clouds, you'll probably want another representation on hand for certain other tasks (like Dreams does). Getting decent polygonal models out of point cloud data for that task could be tricky in some cases.



I can't see games giving up polygons any time soon, in general. Though we may see more getting experimental. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, you can mix representations in a single scene or game. I think that capture/render tech could be perfect for something like a racing game or a football game or the like, where you want to reproduce real world locations, or other games that want to bring in 'real world' assets. Data management is the trick though.