fastplotlib/fastplotlib

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1523 stars · 65 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

fastplotlib is a GPU-accelerated scientific plotting library for Python built on the pygfx rendering engine, which uses WGPU (Vulkan, DX12, or Metal) for fast rendering. It provides an expressive, array-like API for interactive visualization of large-scale data across Jupyter, Qt, glfw, and wxPython.

Use cases

• plot large datasets interactively in python
• gpu-accelerated scientific visualization
• real-time visualization of camera or instrument data
• interactive data exploration in jupyter lab
• rapid prototyping of algorithms with live plots
• visualize machine learning model data
• render plots offscreen with wgpu

When to choose

• you need fast, interactive plotting of large-scale scientific data
• you want GPU-accelerated rendering via Vulkan, DX12, or Metal
• you need the same plotting code to run in Jupyter, Qt, glfw, or wxPython
• you are building real-time visualization for acquisition systems

When to avoid

• you need publication-quality static figures with matplotlib-style APIs
• you need a fully stable, mature API (project is in late alpha)
• you have no GPU and need more than limited CPU software rendering
• you need simple quick charts where matplotlib or plotly suffice

Facets

library · maturity experimental

data-visualization graphics gpu-computing data-visualization data-science machine-learning python cross-platform wgpu pygfx gpu-accelerated interactive-plotting scientific-visualization jupyter vulkan webgpu gpu

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="fastplotlib/fastplotlib")