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 (\textit{e.g.}, Unity and Blender) by leveraging triangle primitives compatible with standard rasterization hardware. However, existing methods are developed and evaluated under inconsistent settings, with limited comparison and little investigation into practical graphics engine deployment. This gap significantly hinders the understanding of their real-world usability. To address this issue, we introduce MeshSplatBench, the first benchmark for systematic evaluation of triangle- and mesh-based neural rendering from native rendering to graphics engine deployment. We propose a hierarchical deployment protocol with two options: (1) Standard deployment, using a conventional opaque mesh pipeline with vertex colors and hardware Z-buffering; and (2) Dedicated deployment, incorporating method-specific engine implementations to preserve appearance and compositing properties (e.g., alpha blending). For mesh splatting, we further introduce a structural audit to evaluate the topological and geometric integrity of exported surfaces for downstream graphics applications. Extensive evaluations reveal three key findings: (1) graphics engine deployment introduces noticeable quality degradation across methods, while mesh splatting approaches achieve relatively better robustness under standard deployment; (2) dedicated deployment can preserve most rendering fidelity at the cost of approximately 6-30$\times$ slowdown; and (3) explicit connectivity and shared vertex indexing in current mesh splatting methods remain insufficient to guarantee manifoldness or global connectivity. Our benchmark demonstrates that rasterizability alone does not imply graphics readiness and highlights the importance of evaluating practical engine compatibility. The benchmark and source code will be publicly released.