| I hope this isn't beating a dead horse - but I got interested in performance, so I ran both of your tests, Karl - point-plotting and image plotting - against PGPLOT. Results are plotted below. Gnuplot is about 2x slower than PGPLOT for plotting points. It's about 6x slower for plotting images in the large-image regime, and 30x or more slower at displaying them - but see the caveat below. On my machine, neither PGPLOT nor Gnuplot meets the "Karl standard" for speed. All of the elapsed times include time to construct the output repository (either X11 window or postscript file). I used the postscript output in the imaging test, because stock PGPLOT doesn't actually touch all the data -- it uses sampling, so displaying images larger than the display window doesn't involve touching every pixel -- at least by the actual display code. Sampling is useful for some things, ghastly for others. The postscript output may be a "fairer" test, since it requires both engines to touch every pixel. But I left the X11 in because for some applications the PGPLOT choice is the correct one (e.g. quick-and-dirty movies). It might be interesting to throw PLPlot and Prima into the mix too...  |
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