Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)

Creator here. I built ChartGPU because I kept hitting the same wall: charting libraries that claim to be "fast" but choke past 100K data points.

The core insight: Canvas2D is fundamentally CPU-bound. Even WebGL chart libraries still do most computation on the CPU. So I moved everything to the GPU via WebGPU:

- LTTB downsampling runs as a compute shader - Hit-testing for tooltips/hover is GPU-accelerated - Rendering uses instanced draws (one draw call per series)

The result: 1M points at 60fps with smooth zoom/pan.

Live demo: https://chartgpu.github.io/ChartGPU/examples/million-points/

Currently supports line, area, bar, scatter, pie, and candlestick charts. MIT licensed, available on npm: `npm install chartgpu`

Happy to answer questions about WebGPU internals or architecture decisions.

Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)
github.com

Wa, this is smooth, man. This is so cool. This is really sexy and cool, the examples page (https://chartgpu.github.io/ChartGPU/examples/index.html) has many good.

I hope you have a way to monetize/productize this, because this has three.js potential. I love this. Keep goin! And make it safe (a way to fund, don't overextend via OSS). Good luck, bud.

Also, you are a master of naming. ChartGPU is a great name, lol!

Thanks! The name was honestly just "what does this do" + "how does it do it" haha.

Interesting you mention three.js - there's definitely overlap in the WebGPU graphics space. My focus is specifically on 2D data visualization (time series, financial charts, dashboards), but I could see the rendering patterns being useful elsewhere.

On sustainability - still figuring that out. For now it's a passion project, but I've thought about a "pro" tier for enterprise features (real-time collaboration, premium chart types) while keeping the core MIT forever. Open to ideas if you have thoughts.

Appreciate the kind words! :)

No Firefox support? It has had WebGPU support since version 141.

Even when I turn on dom.webgpu.enabled, I still get "WebGPU is disabled by blocklist" even though your domain is not in the blocklist, and even if I turn on gfx.webgpu.ignore-blocklist.

Fun benchmark :) I'm getting 165 fps (screen refresh rate), 4.5-5.0 in GPU time and 1.0 - 1.2 in CPU time on a 9970x + RTX Pro 6000. Definitely the smoothest graph viewer I've used in a browser with that amount of data, nicely done!

Would be great if you had a button there one can press, and it does a 10-15 second benchmark then print a min/max report, maybe could even include loading/unloading the data in there too, so we get some ranges that are easier to share, and can compare easier between machines :)