I know enough about 3D graphics to understand the difference between polygons and voxels, but at the same time I know enough that I realize I don't actually understand how voxels work, how they actually get drawn in the end.

So a voxel is a point/cube in 3D space, akin to how a pixel is a point/square in 2D space. But how does the computer draw it on screen? How does the logic work to put the thing on screen?

For a polygon cube, it uses 8 points and 12 triangle polygons, passes the info to the GPU, and tells it to draw a triangle from A to B to C a bunch of times.

How would this work for a cube represented by a voxel? Does the voxel coordinates represent the center of the cube? Lets keep it simple and say it represents a corner, and the size represents the length of each edge. How does the computer process this info to draw your 1 voxel cube? Does it figure out where all the corners of the cube are and plays connect the dots? Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding this, cause whenever I try to think about it, it always feels like at some point it must do something similar to how polygons are drawn.

@alyx
I always assumed, that voxels are as a concept connected only to the simulation part of the problem, where you can represent any item by describing its volume, but you have to convert them to polygons in order to draw them.