Computer graphics [especially three-dimensional (3D) graphics, and interactive, 3D graphics in particular] is
finding its way into an increasing number of applications, from games and simple graphing programs for personal
computers to sophisticated modeling and visualization software on workstations and supercomputers. Therefore,
3D graphics standards are receiving increased attention in the computer graphics community as more people write
programs that use 3D graphics and as those already possessing 3D graphics programs want those programs to run
on a variety of computing platforms. Many tools are now available, including Direct3D, OpenGL, VRML, and
Java3D. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but all have the common goal of attempting to enable the
creation of effective 3D graphics on multiple platforms. OpenGL is currently the most widely-adopted 3D
graphics Application Programmer's Interface (API) in the industry, bringing thousands of applications to a wide
variety of computer platforms. Recently, Java3D has emerged as a new challenger in the graphics API "contest".
This API was released late in 1998. It was touted as the "fourth generation of 3D graphics APIs" because of its
many new features and implementation approach in comparison to more established APIs such as OpenGL. The
main purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the graphic rendering performance of Java3D compared with OpenGL. In
this project, three 3D graphics test cases were implemented in both the OpenGL API and the Java 3D API and the
rendering performance of each was measured on a specific computer. While Java 3D was found to have a higher
rendering rate than OpenGL, the performance of Java 3D was only marginally greater. This result suggests that
Java3D, at least for computers and graphics card was used have better performance than OpenGL.