You always get surprises when optimizing, for example IE11 and probably other browsers use DOM optimization with hardware acceleration, so keeping it as a table, and just changing the bgColor instead of creating a new table, might be fast, fast enough, or even faster then canvas. As for imageData vs fillRect I would go with fillRect first as it makes it easier to scale to the clients pixelRatio, eg you want to scale to 200% on a device that has a pixel ratio of 2 in order to make it look crisp. In my experience, manipulating single pixels are sometimes also slower! But if you really want to get advanced you could divide the screen up in different pieces and use many (off-screen) canvas's and/or web workers, but it would probably only work on Chrome, and then you would operate on the imageData buffer.