Abstract: Global illumination is very significant in realistic rendering. Point based global illumination(PBGI) can produce high quality and noise free rendering results efficiently. It was widely used in movie production and film industry, though it is biased. In this survey, we review the recent work about PBGI, and summarize the four aspects: more complex rendering effects, point-based rendering, many-core acceleration, and PBGI storage. In this paper, the above-mentioned four kinds of PBGI methods are compared and analyzed from five aspects: speed,quality, many core parallelism, scalability and implementation. The goal of our paper is to give the readers a comprehensive overview of PBGI and to facilitate further research to address the limitations of existing approaches.