[matplotlib-devel] Some update on GL backend

[Nicolas R. <Nic...@in...>]

Hi all,


I'm continuing experimenting various solution for a possible GL backend for matplotlib and I made some progress (but no integration yet).

You can check results (and experimenting yourself at various places, sorry for that):

Text : http://code.google.com/p/freetype-gl/
       http://code.google.com/p/freetype-py/

Images interpolation & 3D : http://code.google.com/p/glumpy/

Lines/Shapes : http://code.google.com/p/gl-agg/

The last experiments (gl-agg) were about high-quality lines and shapes. It seems OpenGL may offer pretty decent quality (IMHO) as you can see on the various screenshots that compare agg and opengl. demo-lines.py and a demo-circles.py show zooming/panning speed (mouse drag / scroll).

There are still some more work to, mainly concave polygons and bezier filled shapes.

However, the whole integration into matplotlib may require a lot of work since OpenGL technics may radically differ from their matplotlib counterpart in some case. For example, a grid is rendered using a single shader that manages internally all the lines and ticks. Another example is image interpolation that is done entirely on the graphic card (see glumpy).

Also, Don't be fooled by the speed of the current demo-lines.py and demo-circles.py because they don't offer the versatility of matplotlib.



At this point, I may lack time to write the actual integration into matplotlib and I may not know enough the internal matplotlib machinery. Maybe this could be a future project for next year / Google summer of code ? What do you think ?


Nicolas