[enriquto]

But why do you want to fit the whole dataset in memory? If the dataset is stored in a tiled and multi-scaled representation you need to only grab the part of it that is needed to fit your screen (which is a constant, small amount of data, even if the dataset is arbitrarily large).

If you insist to fit the entire thing in memory, it may seem better to do so in the plain RAM, which nowadays is of humongous size even in "modest" systems.

[rossant]

Maybe it's an instance of Parkinson's law [1]: if it all fits in GPU memory, just put it all in and plot it. This is much simpler to implement than any out-of-memory technique. It's also easier for the user—`scatter(x, y)` would work effortlessly with, say, 10 million points.

But with 10 billion points, you need to consider more sophisticated approaches.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law