Visualizing data (plotting functions of two independent variables)
First off this post doesn’t contain that much textual substance, for more read the previous post I made, also the graphing library I am using is F# for Visualization.
While it is possible to plot these functions by hand in the very, very (emphasis on very, e.g. a plane) simple cases anything other than that almost certainly requires some form of professional mathematical package, or in this case a plotting library.
I have only used F# for Visualization (now uses WPF not DirectX) on my home machine which is (briefly): 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, NVidia 7900 GS 256MB.
I found the performance of the 3D plotting really quite good.
Note: there is no point to the below graph, I just wanted to see if using somewhat over zealous input ranges would slow this thing down – it didn’t on my machine (well probably a few ms but nothing really noticeable).
I was curious…
…still was very fast to generate, however when I rotate the graph there is a very small pause (< 1s).
Note: you can also interact with these graphs with the mouse, so you can rotate them etc.
Having played with F# for Visualization quite a bit now I am starting to now use it all the time for this kind of thing rather than firing up something else like Octave, plus you get the added bonus of using F#!
Before I go I must remember that if I insert a few fairly large images in Live Writer then subsequent typing will be on a several second delay – so annoying!!!!