I'm struggling with the performance of Nevron with charts which are plotting data series with lots of data points (~100,000) which is displaying the data as a step line rather than a simple line. A simple line has the option to enable a sampled line series which improves the plotting of this considerably. However, there is no similar option that I can find for a step line. Does anyone have any hints and tips on how to improve the performance in this instance? I've tried changing the render mode and other options but all seem to have little effect. Any ideas welcome!

Thanks

Colin

Hi Colin,

Currently there is no built-in re-sampling option for step line charts.

In general, if you display 100,000 data points simultaneously the chart will look the same, no matter if you use a line or a step line series. Unfortunately, if you need data zooming and scrolling functionality – at this point there is no easy solution for this scenario. You can implement a solution that uses a step line series for the zoomed-in data and a simple line series when many data points are displayed at once.

Best Regards,
Nevron Support Team

You are right that if the data is spread evenly across the range the difference between step line and line will look the same but we have varying densities of data across the range so it may become an issue. Also we wish to allow zooming for sure. Is there any mathematical reason why this feature is not available for step lines? I assume that the algorithm would be very similar to the line implementation - is this something that can be added ourselves via the extension points offered? We could of course pre-process the data but were hoping to utilize the functionality inside Nevron itself.

In an effort to try out the performance options offered by Nevron I'm looking at the documentation which contains the sample text:

chartControl.Settings.RenderDevice = RenderDevice.OpenGL;

but the settings of a chart control does not contain a RenderDevice property!? Has anyone come across where this has been moved to or has this feature been removed?

Hi, Colin,

The documentation seems to be a bit outdated. I've found the following there as well (Chart for .NET > About Nevron Chart for .NET > Porting From Older Versions > Porting from Q2 2008 to Q3 2008):

----
The NChartControl.Settings.RenderDevice property has been depricated. To switch a chart in 3D mode you should now use the Enable3D property of the chart panel. This allows you to have multiple 2D and 3D chart in one chart control. The following code snippets show how code should be rewritten to reflect this change:

C# Copy Code
// old code
nChartControl1.Settings.RenderDevice = RenderDevice.OpenGL;

// new code
NChart chart = nChartControl1.Charts[0];
chart.Enable3D = true;
----

Actually all 3D charts are rendered with OpenGL. By default the chart uses OpenGL in software mode, but you can switch to hardware accelerated mode with the following code:

nChartControl1.Settings.RenderSurface = RenderSurface.Window;

We will consider implementing re-sampling for step line series soon.

Best Regards,
Nevron Support Team