Comment by sergmiser

Not substantially faster as your still drawing roughly the same number of primitives (Gaussians are rendered as a quad covering the splat area), and the extra cost in shading isn't that expensive compared to all the fragment samples / depth tests. Triangles also tend to be less effective at modelling most real world 3D scenes. In most cases I tried, it required more primitives, longer training, and ultimately lower FPS and PSNR than 3DGS. Other methods like PSGR also helped push 3DGS to better fit real world geometry. Triangle splatting and its variants do not generate clean efficient meshes like what you might be used to with a modelled scene [0].

[0]: https://meshsplatting.github.io/viewer/