I always thought it was interesting that my modern CPU takes ages to plot 100,000 or so points in R or Python (ggplot2, seaborn, plotnine, etc) and yet somehow my 486DX 50Mhz could pump out all those pixels to play Doom interactively and smoothly.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73470828/ggplot2-is-slow...
Base R graphics would plot 100,000 points in about 100 milliseconds.
x <- rnorm(100000)
plot(x)
x <- rnorm(100000)
system.time({
png("file.png")
plot(x)
dev.off()
})
user system elapsed
0.179 0.002 0.180I ended up with writing my own tool that's able to show millions of points and never looked back.