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And here I am trying to get a bunch of 2d lines rendering quickly in a 2d canvas for some charts. So strange to me that something 'simple' like drawing 20,000 lines chugs along at ~20fps and a water simulation with caustics is there running at 30fps just fine. Goes to show how much you gain from a GPU if you're using it for something it's designed to do.

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WebGL would draw your 20,000 lines much faster. It's not just for 3D; charting would be a perfectly reasonable use for WebGL.

Unfortunately it's a lot of smaller charts and they're embedded in an SVG based diagram interface as foreignObjects, which doesn't support a WebGL context (in Chrome at least). I'd love to play with WebGL, but not usable for this task.

Writing the whole interface in a WebGL canvas could be really fun, but far too much work for an MVP, and would kind of mess with making it work on iPad etc.

At this rate, you'd get an awful lot of people who can't see your chart if you did it in WebGL!

I agree for mobile web apps. For PC, tell them to switch away from IE. If you're making high-end graphics, your users need a high-end browser.

Getting lots of 2D lines to render on a chart fast is fairl;y easy with Google Maps and KML. It uses Douglas Peuker simplification.

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