I'm working on a project which reads a text file and creates a 3D directed graph from the data. Currently I'm representing the nodes as simple cubes and I have lines drawn between the connected nodes. What I'm missing is a way to identify which node is which. I'd like to have the name of the node represented on (the faces of the cube) or above the cube as text but I'm not sure which is the best way to go about this. It seems that it would be wasteful to render to texture every single node's name and then apply it to all 6 faces of every cube. Is this the best way to do it or is there a better way? Is there any way to render 3D text that I could place above the cubes? Any advice would be appreciated, Thanks.

Creating a new texture for each cube might be wasteful if you have a lot of different nodes, as each would require its own texture. But you only have to create the texture once.
If you already have a way to render text you could project the position of the node from 3D to 2D and render an text overly at that point. I guess it would serve the purpose, but maybe it is not the look you are after? There is no built in method to render 3D text, but you could build it yourself.