How can I speed up mplot3d's render?

Question

I'm visualizing timestamped xy positions of objects using mplot3d. I would like to rotate and zoom into the resulting figure to better understand the details. Python is really slow at rendering the figure, making it almost impossible to do what I want. Is there a way to make the 3d-plot faster to manipulate (GPU acceleration, wireframe, etc.)?

Answer 1

An option may be to use MayaVi, which is recommended by mplot3d itself: http://matplotlib.org/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/faq.html#how-is-mplot3d-different-from-mayavi

(in fact "highly recommended")