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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
December 11, 2013
Question

2D plot limit of 500000 points

  • December 11, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 1440 views

Mathcad's 2D plot has a limit of 5*10^5 points (total of all traces). If you try to plot a single point more the plot usually fails. This limit applys to Mathcad 15(& below) as well as Prime3 (Prime2 has a limit of 5*10^4).

Does anyone know if there is a depper sense for that limit? Probably memory consumption but then we don't have a limit if we create vectors and matrices - it will simply fail with an appropriate error message if it really runs out of memory.

My reason for asking is that I think I found a way to overrule this limit (at least I was not aware that this would be possible) by simply plotting whole vectors one over the other. It looks to me that all verctor elements are plotted even though there may be far more than 5*10^5 points. At least it works for Mathcad 15, haven't tried in Prime. See attached sheet.

Now I am asking if anybody can tell what problems we can ran into using this method

1 reply

Z
zhulaojianke1-Visitor
1-Visitor
December 12, 2013

I think that MathCAD has looked the whole vector as only one number, it has only plotted one point when plot the vector, even you have found many points on the graph. If you try to plot more than 5*10^5 vectors, it will still show the error.

I think not only MathCAD, other mathsoftware will also do this thing like mathcad do, because in many cases in engineering calculate, the vector, no matter how large is it, is only one number.

If I want to plot some areas with different colour on a map to show a distribution of some thing like air pollution, population, campaign support-rate, etc., I would use this method, and maybe record these vectors' changes by time as a animation.

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