Fast Surface Plot for ~10M Points

[BitCourier]

As stated in the Question: I'm looking for the possibility to Plot 10M Points as a surface. Currently it's slowing down my UI by a lot.

The data isn't changing fast, so utilizing a preprocessing thread and keeping most of the data used in "ImPlot3D::PlotSurface" would be handy. Are there any suggestions on that?
Thanks :)

[brenocq]

I'm currently working on #172 to offload some of the CPU work to the GPU (projection transformations). I'm also planning to be able to cache plot data on the GPU to avoid copying data from the CPU to the GPU every frame, this should speed up rendering quite a bit when the plot data does not change very often.

[BitCourier]

Thank you for your fast answer!
Do you think it's possible for me on my own to use the current stable code to decouple rendering and preprocessing until the GPU procesing works well? May there a general use case for the Library to introduce an API like this? Then I maybe would try

[brenocq]

For now I would suggest you to continue using the latest release or main branch. Since 10M points are a lot of points (you probably don't even have enough pixels to render one triangle per pixel), I recommend you to have a cached downsampled version of you data, and only perform the downsample operation again when the data changes. I was able to use this strategy in the past to render point clouds.

[BitCourier]

Okay, that's how I was implementing it to get it a little bit faster. The downside is the low resolution when zooming into a particular region.
Thank you very much :)

[BitCourier]

I've got one follow up question: will it be possible to port the OpenGL implementation to Vulkan then? I'm currently switching away from GL because of its limitations.

[brenocq]

The downside is the low resolution when zooming into a particular region.

Oh I see, in this case (if you really need), you could vary the downsampling depending on the axes ranges. Having the plot clipping enabled also helps a bit (clipping is enabled by default if not disabled with ImPlot3DFlags_NoClip

I've got one follow up question: will it be possible to port the OpenGL implementation to Vulkan then? I'm currently switching away from GL because of its limitations.

Initially I'll implement the OpenGL backend because it is easier to do and the option most people use. After that I'm planning to also support both Vulkan and Metal.

[BitCourier]

I don't know how long it will take for me to adopt my UI rendering to Vulkan, possibly I will be able to try the OpenGL version