ChartGPU
WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)
Details
- External ID
- 46706528
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- ChartGPU
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Jan. 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 670
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9986824769433466
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- gpu compute and acceleration tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- high-performance charting library
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a custom WebGPU charting engine rendering 1M+ points at 60fps requires expert-level graphics programming, custom WGSL compute/render shaders, and GPU memory lifecycle management.
What it would actually take: The project requires writing custom WGSL (WebGPU Shading Language) compute and vertex shaders to offload data filtering, aggregation, and coordinate transforms directly to the GPU without CPU readbacks. Developers must handle raw memory buffers, multi-buffer ring queues, antialiased line extrusion, and instanced primitive rendering in JavaScript/TypeScript. The primary barrier is deep graphics engineering and hardware-level performance profiling beyond standard web development.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: SciChart, Lightning Chart
Concerns raised: Licensing strategy - need to prevent competitors from leveraging open core, Performance still slower than established competitors like SciChart, WebGPU adapter compatibility issues and browser support, Sustainability risk if not properly licensed - larger firms could copy, Built with LLM tools, uncertain long-term viability
Feature requests: Order Book Heatmaps with level 2/3 data visualization, Non-linear X axis for gaps/trading sessions, Logarithmic scales, candlesticks, Heikin-Ashi, and volume profiles, Crosshairs that snap to OHLC data, Stacked area charts
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 119 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #2 of 120 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 84 days after the earliest competitor.
- Browser-based video compositor built on WebGPU · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- vgpu · ph · 2026-09-22 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- GraphGPU · hn · 2026-03-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU · hn · 2025-11-03 · 95 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- WebGCM · hn · 2026-09-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- PantheonGPU · hn · 2026-08-18 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- RunMat · hn · 2025-12-02 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) in the browser via WebGPU · hn · 2026-07-29 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.