If your data is generated from a known random process what good is showing 500,000 sample points as opposed to 5,000? (I'm not suggesting there isn't a reason for doing so. I'm only stating that it is not obvious.) If the data generating process is completely known, then displaying the surface that contains, say, 95% of the probability (with some appropriate restrictions such as including the (x,y,z) locations with the highest probability density values) might be desirable. (For example, in a two-dimensional case with a bivariate normal, then showing the elliptical contours containing various probabilities is common.)

So my question is why stick with just displaying the data points when with 500,000 sample points, you could estimate the distributional parameters and then display the underlying constant probability density surfaces?

I'm unsure i'm new to 11.0 myself

obviously, turn off automatic things you didn't above (Clipping, Axes, anything that might get evaluated while rotating)

this works pretty smoothly:

Graphics3D[
 Table[Sphere[{Random[], Random[], Random[]}, 0.01], {i, 0, 1000}]]

but it's 1,000 objects - each object has many "texels" in 3d lingo (each ball has a whole plane of vertices). video games typically have high vertex count but low(er) object count, and objects at a distance are specially obstructed / blurred because: they aren't fully being rendered.

50,000 objects is allot. I think there is some thing here where your drawing 50,000 objects not a single mesh model with 50,000 vertices (say, a mesh of some object like and airplane) and expecting 50,000 rendered shaded objects to be the same speed as 50,000 vertexes object who's surface is shaded 1x. rotating the two would not be the same "job".

i see the same thing you do but usure if that is "blazing fast" or "slow and un-optomized" (if it re-evaluates all per degree of rotation to avoid storing sets of points in memory?). i am pretty sure that any slowness is like mm adding things like Axes or other extras who's viewing quality are preffered to flat out speed.

interesting question