Any tricks to increase QtChart responsiveness?

CJha

Hi! I need to make a line plot of a large amount of data in a short period of time. The goal is to have 100,000 data points plotted in a line series in less than 50 milliseconds. I am able to do this through QPainterPath by painting on a QWidget, but I would like to give QtChart another shot because the QXYSeries class involves some basic interactions that I am unable to implement otherwise through QPainterPath. To check the responsiveness of the QtChart I made a small test application, here is the entire code for that:

mainWindow.h

#include <QtWidgets/QMainWindow>
#include <QtCharts/qchartview.h>
#include <QtCharts/qlineseries.h>
#include <QtMath>
#include <QElapsedTimer>
#include <QDebug>
#include "ui_mainWindow.h"

using namespace QtCharts;

class mainWindow : public QMainWindow
{
    Q_OBJECT

public:
    mainWindow(QWidget *parent = Q_NULLPTR);

private:
    Ui::mainWindowClass ui;

    QLineSeries *series;
    QChartView *view;
    QChart *chart;

    double data;

protected:
    virtual void resizeEvent(QResizeEvent *event) override;
};

mainWindow.cpp

#include "mainWindow.h"

mainWindow::mainWindow(QWidget *parent)
    : QMainWindow(parent)
{
    ui.setupUi(this);

    /* Creating Line Series */
    series = new QLineSeries();
    for(int ii = 0; ii < 100000; ++ii)
    {
        data = 2 * sin(2 * M_PI * 3 * ii / 100000);
        *series << QPointF(ii, data);
    }

    /* Creating Chart */
    chart = new QChart();
    chart->addSeries(series);
    chart->createDefaultAxes();
    chart->setAnimationOptions(QChart::NoAnimation);

    /* Creating Chart View */
    view = new QChartView(chart);
    view->setChart(chart);
    view->setRenderHint(QPainter::Antialiasing);
    view->setParent(ui.horizontalFrame);
}

void mainWindow::resizeEvent(QResizeEvent *event)
{
    QElapsedTimer timer;
    timer.start();

    chart->resize(width(), height());

    qDebug() << timer.elapsed() << "milliseconds";
}

I am getting a response time of more than 500 milliseconds. I have already disabled all animations. Is there any way I can improve this response time significantly?

For reference, I am using Qt 5.15.0 with Visual Studio Community 2019.

SGaist

Hi,

Likely not the answer you are looking for but you might want to check the Qwt project. It may have better performance for that kind of cases.

CJha

@SGaist Thanks! I have considered Qwt Project, however, it doesn't have proper documentation to tell me if it has the interactions that I need. On top of that, I am quite sure plotting the same amount of data on Qwt will take upwards of 100 milliseconds which is still beyond the limits of my requirements.

Pl45m4

@CJha

Nobody can look at 100.000 data points.
Use downsampling to reduce the amount of points shown at a time. While zooming in or so, you can increase that amount again until you show that area with all the data.

CJha

@Pl45m4 I know, I have developed my own method of downsampling for a line plot, so that peaks and overall data values are preserved. I can use it with QWidget and draw there much faster (15 - 20 ms). However, even if I use the raw method of plotting all the data points in QWidget it takes slightly more than 100 milliseconds, the same raw method in QChart takes between 500 - 600 milliseconds.

J.Hilk

@CJha Charts is far from optimized, especially the QWidget version, have you tried a QQuickWidget/View and the QML Chart view?

usually results in better overall performance

CJha

@J-Hilk Thanks for the suggestion.
I haven't tried it, I am working with C++ only. As far as I understand for Qt Quick I will have to use QML which I haven't learned yet (I started with C++ a few a month back). Hopefully, the Qt 6 release in December this year will bring huge improvements to Qt Charts.

A.A.SEZEN

@CJha We agree when it's a little late. I tried without changing your code. Output was 52 milliseconds. Maybe not a contribution, but the difference is not 1/10. QChart seems to do what you want.
Windows 10 x64, Qt 6.1, MinGW 64 and AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U 8Gb RAM.

samon_sg

@CJha try to useOpenGL for series, for qml i use series.useOpenGL = true