Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)
huntergemmer Wednesday, January 21, 2026
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.