I have a module that renders images of shaded spheres. It avoids the need to create polygonal representations, and so requires lots less memory than Glyph/Image. Though I haven't done any rigorous timing, anecdotally I was able to render 36000 spheres using it in about 12 seconds with memory set at 50M. In contrast, I needed 250 meg to glyph and software render the same spheres in 18 seconds (using the default settings for Glyph) and never got it done in hardware rendering. It comes in two forms: one analogous to Render, eg. image = SphereRender(spheres,camera) and an interactive form analogous to Image (using user interactors). It also optionally adds a fog effect for depth cueing. Downsides are that that is all it does; you can't put anything but spheres in there. It also doesn't do specular hightlights, but it'd be trivial (and virtually free) to add.
Greg
