MeshSplatBench: A Unified Benchmark for Triangle- and Mesh-Based Neural Rendering

Triangle- and mesh-based neural rendering aims to bridge neural scene representations and existing graphics engines (e.g., Unity, Blender) by leveraging triangle primitives compatible with standard rasterization hardware. There have been several such methods driven by parallel efforts, developed and evaluated under inconsistent settings, with little or no comparison with each other; critically, most even have never used graphics engines for evaluation nor considered deployability in practice – significantly undermining the objective and motivation. To address these issues, we introduce MeshSplatBench, the very first benchmark of its kind that enables both systematic evaluation of graphics engine based deployment and Non-Engine Render evaluation for triangle- and mesh-based neural rendering methods. Importantly, a deployment protocol with two rendering options is introduced: (1) Standard deployment – a conventional opaque mesh pipeline with vertex colors and hardware Z-buffering; (2) Dedicated deployment – adding method-specific engine implementations supporting the retained appearance and compositing features (e.g., alpha blending), so that the characteristics of each specific model can be taken into account. For mesh splatting, we further propose a structural audit of exported surfaces, diagnosing topological and geometric integrity toward downstream graphics assets. We highlight several results: (1) Graphics engine deployment would incur image-quality degradation under both deployment options. Among all methods tested, mesh splatting methods degrade the least under standard deployment. (2) The way of deployment matters – dedicated deployment can keep the majority of fidelity at about 6$\sim$30$\times$ slowdown. (3) About mesh splatting, the current approaches to explicit connectivity and shared indexing are still limited: shared vertex indexing alone does not ensure manifoldness or global connectivity. From this benchmark, we validate that rasterizability is merely part of graphics readiness, and highlight the significance of assessing the graphics engine deployment process (e.g., the degree of engine compatibility). Source code will be released.