I have experimented with path.simplify and can’t see any appreciable improvements.
Incidently, I also experimented with other back ends. I found that all the back ends
involving Agg behave similarly. However, using the ‘GTK’ backend it renders the
whole 1 million points and does it very fast (about 5x faster than Agg backends).
I also found that gnuplot can render the whole million points very fast using the
‘x11’ terminal. I am guessing that both matplotlib’s GTK backend and gnuplot’s
‘x11’ terminal use the hardware accelerated display driver.
David