A Comparison between HTML5 and OpenGL in Rendering Fractal

Abstract

This is the era of web applications as for each desktop application, there is a corresponding web application being developed. Each web application consists of interactive graphical user interface and some of them requires in-browser rendering. In this period, it's high time to study the abilities of modern day web applications on handling graphical operations. As both HTML5 and OpenGL are strong tools for graphical operation and both depicts rendering capabilities on different platforms, in this paper, they have been compared thoroughly. To measure the effectiveness and compare the results from HTML5 and OpenGL, Fractals are considered to be drawn on web platform and on desktop graphical program. In this paper, A simple HTML5 web page is implemented along with a C++ based command line program is also implemented to render fractal trees. HTML5 and OpenGL both performed significantly well in case of rendering fractal trees where HTML5 fell a little bit short in case of rendering time in case of large number of iterations. As the number of iteration increased rapidly, the rendering time required by the HTML5 increased but it performed on par with OpenGL in rendering quality.