When using subsurface scattering some shaders like 3DelightMaterial offer a choice between Ray-Traced (the default choice) subsurface scattering and Point-Based SSS. This article helps you being informed about pros and cons of each.

Pros of Ray Tracing SSS (default)

Ray-traced subsurface scattering has major advantages over the point-based version:

• It can compute single scattering effect in addition to multiple scattering.
• It can resolve subsurface light transport on thin geometric details. 
• It doesn't need any pre-computation and works well with progressive final frame rendering and IPR.
• It is easier to get light blockers inside geometry to have interesting volume shadowing effects.
• It has a much smaller memory footprint.
• It works well on scenes of large scales - a big problem in the point-based version.
• The overall look is very close to the point-based version and can be used as a drop-in replacement.

Cons of Ray Tracing SSS

• At lower sampling counts it produces more sampling noise than the point-based version.