Browser Platform Assessment for X3Dom Graphics’ Rendering Capabilities

Abstract — With the course of time, the process of creating and serving web pages is becoming more complicated, since some forms of modern web content are really demanding. 3D graphics are definitely included among them. In that context, the Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics standard by the Web3D consortium provides a technology for easing the deployment of interactive 3D content over the web. In particular, a combination of technologies such as WebGL, X3D, X3Dom and JavaScript can provide 3D graphics on browsers without any requirement for plug-ins. In this paper, we at first introduce a methodology for efficient evaluation of browsers ’ performance as it concerns their capability to render X3Dom graphics. Our methodology measures how many frames per second (fps) a browser can render for a specific 3D content. Hence, the fps metric captures the actual 3D content’s rendering frequency a browser can reach. Then, we present the results of our benchmark on the assessment of some popular web browsers as they render and display specified X3D graphics under controlled conditions. To this end, a series of experiments using different browsers on a variety of operating systems were conducted to measure browsers ’ achieved fps. The results underline the performance differences between the various browser platforms