| dc.description.abstract | This research describes the design of a virtual architectural walkthrough application, developed
and run on two different platforms; Windows and Linux operating system. Both platforms are
then compared in order to measure and evaluate the performance of each platform used to build
the virtual architectural walkthrough. The decision on which platform performs best is difficult
to answer without actual facts and data. Therefore, this research is an attempt to quantify the
relative merits of the Windows and Linux operating systems as an underlying platform for a
virtual architectural walkthrough and to experimentally determine, which either of the two
demonstrates superiority for this task. This is to make sure that the base in which the particular
application is run at has sufficient help at its maximum performance. This research is also
important to show which operating system has better capabilities, speed and ample of memory
to sustain a virtual reality application. In pursuit of this goal, several experiments are detailed
and recorded, in which key criteria are compared between the two operating systems. The
performance of each platform is measured based on four main key criteria’s which is frame
rate, image quality, CPU usage and memory usage. From the overall experiment, results
indicate that the frame rate and CPU usage is much better in Linux compared to Windows
platform. Meanwhile the memory usage reading shows otherwise. As for the image quality,
Linux has much better capabilities in maintaining its image quality compared to Windows
platform. Using completely identical hardware, one operating system stood out from the other
as a foundation for a virtual architectural walkthrough application. While Linux did not
completely dominate every test, it should be obvious that the vast majority of the results strongly
favor a virtual architectural walkthrough on Linux rather than Windows in terms of its
performance. Besides having an excellent performance, Linux has the advantage of being open
source. It has the capability of minimizing the budget of development and lower the cost of
infrastructure which is good for all VR developers since the cost of development is far too
expensive when it comes to proprietary software. | en_US |
