June 1996
The reason I did this comparison was to check out the existing VRML plugins for Netscape, compare them on a variety of worlds that I've created (ranging from 30Kb to 2.9MB uncompressed) and feedback the results to the VRML community as well as the browser/plugin authors. Since I don't work for any of the companies mentioned I believe this report is pretty accurate and unbiased. Extensive VRML Test suites are available by Mitra, Chaco, Laurel and Haines all doing an excellent job at testing browsers without making any attempt at ranking the various browsers (and rightly so, since a couple of them are browser authors!). The yardstick for the image quality tests is Webspace1.1 running on SGIs (an Indigo2 Max Impact and an Indy)- after all that's where all my worlds were assembled, tested and configured.
All tests were carried out on two Pentium 100 PCs both running Windows NT (one 3.51 the other 4.0 beta). Hard disk sizes are probably irrelevant for such a test, there was enough swap space on both machines (approx. 400MB). The computers had 64 and 96MB Ram and a Viper PCI 2mbVRam and a Matrox Millennium 4mbWRam card respectively. Both computers were running Netscape 3.0 beta4 with the latest display drivers et al. Almost all tests were carried twice; in both 8bit and 24bit mode. The size of the Netscape window was approximately 640X480 pixels in all tests. As a final note, all the worlds that I used for the testing are VRML1.0 compliant and passed the vrmllint check with no errors.
(in alphabetical order)
is a simple logo that has a bit of everything except textures. WWWInline, IndexFaceSet, IndexPointSet, lights, cameras, primitives, transparency, etc. Only 24+16Kbyte. This was the model that most browsers rendered very successfully; not surprising since it is extremely simple. Cosmo Player was the best (by a very small margin) followed by Live3D that showed the IndexLineSets as lines with thickness (according to Paper this is a problem with the rendering engine used). V-Realm did an excellent job at rendering but was the slowest of all. VR-Scout doesn't seem to support IndexLineSets but apart from that was very good and smooth. Topper was really fast but with two problems; lights weren't quite right and most important the IndexLineSet was represented as fairly thick cylinders and not lines!
is a not so simple logo, with textures, transparency, simple materials and IndexFaceSets. Size is 310Kbytes plus 30kbytes for the textures or 50Kbytes compressed. This model was done in 3DStudio with lights, textures and materials applied using WebspaceAuthor on an SGI. Here V-Realm was the winner, with excellent rendering, perfect textures and correct lighting-albeit a bit slow. VR-Scout was a close second with very good overall performance. Topper and Live3D were close third with the former having problems with the texture orientation and lighting whereas the latter bleached the textures to almost a grayscale! Cosmo's performance was surprisingly poor with no textures (?) wrong colours and lights.
a chair I've designed with a human figure sitting. Uses CreaseAngle to create smooth shading on the figure's body and clothes while keeping the wooden elements with sharp edges. Only 110Kbytes. The combination of CreaseAngle with sharp planes seems to have created most problems. VR-Scout was the best with excellent quality with V-Realm a close second; the only complain being again speed. Cosmo was third with good allround quality. Topper was quite fast but the rendering was a bit rough. Live3D was dissapointing again with colour and lighting problems.
A small part / test of the Bath City model. This is the famous Pulteney Bridge, complete with textures, LODs, TextureCoordinate2 nodes (targeting facades on the same texture strip). The latter is excellent (in theory at least) to reduce the network load by uploading one texture file that has all the building/shop facades stitched together. It did create serious problems though, since most browsers would resample the 2000x120pixel strip to 128X120 with extremely poor results. WRL + textures is 365+100Kbytes. The WRL is also available compressed (66Kbytes). Best overall performance was by VR-Scout only complain being the resizing of the texture. Live3D was second with again colour problems followed by V-Realm that had the best texture quality (definitely not resampled at 128X120). Topper doesn't seem to support TextureCoordinate2 nodes (well, no textures appeared) as did Cosmo. The latter crashed in 8bit mode and only loaded, with no textures, at 24bit mode.
An architectural competition entry modeled exclusively in 3DStudio, with textures. File size: 300Kbytes + 15Kbytes for textures (or 85Kbyte compressed). In this one I must have done something to the textures since no browser seemed to do a decent job. The best was again V-Realm with the sea texture fine (concrete and ground were quite bad). VR-Scout was second best with more problems on these two textures that now appear almost black. Topper did a good job showing the geometry right but failed on the textures whereas Cosmo did much better in 24bit mode compared to the very poor colours and lights at 8bit. Live3D was again very quick, smooth and with grayscaled textures.
Another architectural competition entry. Very big file (2.9MB uncompressed or 495Kbyte compressed) with no textures but many transparent windows. Mainly used to test whether the browsers can handle something really big. I cannot really name a winner since none of the browsers seem to manage much with this file... Live3D would read it show it and that's about it, Cosmo crashed with a syntax error, V-Realm rendered it (after a long time). Topper and VR-Scout wouldn't load it at all.