[spiderxxxx]

there's 8 million pixels in 4k, so if you're trying to graph 8 million points, might as well just fill up the screen with a single color and call it a day. If you have 8 billion, well you can graph about 0.1% of that and fill up every single pixel of the screen, but then you're just looking at noise. To be able to show connections between nodes, you'd need maybe 9 pixels per node, so that's around 900k nodes you might be able to graph on a 4k screen, assuming a maximum number of connections between nodes is 8, and the connected nodes are adjacent. So now you're at about 0.01% can be graphed on yor display, and that's not even very usable and there'd not be a lot of information you could glean from that. You could go to 81 pixels per node and you'd be able to connect more nodes to a graph, and maybe you could make some sense of it that way, but you'd only be graphing 0.001% and at that point, what's your selection criteria? Your selection criteria for nodes would have more of an impact than how you choose to graph it.

[godelski]

It's unclear to me if you're making the same point I'm about to make. So I guess at best it's another point and at worst another framing?

I think the relationship to a 4k image is a great way to explain why you should never do this. Specifically because we can note how as resolution increases it gets difficult to distinguish the difference. Like the difference between 480p and 720p is quite large but 4k and 8k is... not. A big part of why the high res images even work is because the data being visualized is highly structured and neighboring data strongly relates. So maybe OP's graph contains highly structured graph cliques. But it is likely doubtful. Realistically, OP should be aiming for ways to convey their data with far less than 10k points. Maybe ask yourself a question: can you differentiate a picture of a thousand people from two thousand? Probably not.