Rendering spheres (or points) in a particle system

Question

I am using the Three.JS library to display a point cloud in a web brower. The point cloud is generated once at start up and no further points are added or removed. But it do

Answer 1

The problem with the image is that when you have thousands of points it seems they sometimes obscure each other around the edges. From what I can gather it seems like the black region in a point's png file blocks the image immediately behind the current point. (But it is transparent to points further behind)

You can get rid of the transparency overlapping problem of the underlying square structure by turning

depthTest:false

The problem then is, if you are adding additional objects to the scene the depth-testing will fail and the PointCloud will be rendered in front of the other objects, ignoring the actual order. To get around that you can additionally turn off

depthWrite:false