/3/ - 3DCG

Thread is nearly dead, so hopefully this doesn't get lost in the transition to a new one or deleted when it reaches page 10. Though if it does, I'll repost on the next one if it doesn't get any traction.

So I've got a plane with a GN setup that places a bunch of billboard planes (they're all technically triangles) with a gradient image texture (using an image to speed things up hopefully). I'm using a layout of city roads (white as the roads, black for everything else) as a mask to place the points.
The thing is, for obvious reasons, it's not exactly "performant" for animation. I think mainly because the planes have to track to the camera and rotating 800k points isn't that friendly to the CPU.
So my question is, is there any way of rendering those points in a way that doesn't use geometry? Like back in the day, Blender's particle system let you render particles as halo objects, I'm not sure exactly how it worked or if it would be speedier than what I have already, but surely rendering points as is without geometry and rotation would be faster than what I have now right? So is there some way of doing what I'm doing with a literal fuckload of points, but faster? Using single triangles was as optimized as I could think to go, but if there was a way to just tell Blender to render the points themselves as something that would be much faster I think.

I'm not sure if I explained everything right, but hopefully someone understands what I mean.
Thanks.