Offscreen Rendering Plugin

The Offscreen plugin enables OffscreenCanvas support, allowing SciChart Engine to perform all WebGL rendering and heavy data calculations in a separate Web Worker. This ensures that the UI remains butter-smooth and responsive even during intensive data updates or ultra-high resolution rendering.

Features

• ✅ UI Thread Decoupling: Prevents long-running rendering tasks from blocking user interactions.
• ✅ Worker Pool Support: Distribute rendering of multiple charts across multiple CPU workers.
• ✅ Automatic Fallback: Gracefully falls back to main-thread rendering if OffscreenCanvas is not supported by the browser.
• ✅ Seamless Integration: Supports all standard chart operations transparently.
• ✅ Resource Isolation: Worker-based coordinate conversion and buffer management.

Basic Usage

import { createChart, PluginOffscreen } from 'scichart-engine';

const chart = createChart({
  container: document.getElementById('chart')!
});

// Enable offscreen rendering
await chart.use(PluginOffscreen({
  enabled: true,
  mode: 'auto',
  workerPool: 2 // Use 2 background workers
}));

// All subsequent rendering calls will now be handled inside the Worker
chart.addSeries({ ... });

API Reference

chart.offscreen

// Check connection status
if (chart.offscreen.isEnabled()) {
  console.log('Rendering in background worker!');
}

// Get performance metrics
const stats = chart.offscreen.getStats();
console.log(`Background FPS: ${1000 / stats.lastFrameTime}`);

// Force a flush of the command queue
chart.offscreen.flush();

Configuration Options

Property	Type	Default	Description
enabled	boolean	false	Enable/disable offscreen rendering.
mode	'auto' | 'webgl-only'	'auto'	Layer rendering mode.
workerPool	number	1	Number of background workers to spawn.
transfer	'offscreen' | 'bitmap'	'offscreen'	Data transfer strategy.
fallback	'main-thread' | 'disable'	'main-thread'	Action if worker fails to start.

Important Considerations

Thread Safety

When using the Offscreen plugin, direct access to certain DOM-related chart internals might be limited from within the worker. Use the standard event bus and API calls for communication.

Cross-Origin Isolation

For maximum performance with SharedArrayBuffer, ensure your server headers include:

• Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin
• Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp

Browser Support

Offscreen rendering requires modern browser support for OffscreenCanvas.

• Chrome/Edge: Full support.
• Firefox: Supported since v105.
• Safari: Supported since v16.4.

If unsupported, the plugin automatically reverts to main-thread rendering unless configured otherwise.