Performance Analysis for Image Rendering on Different Operating Systems

This study evaluates image rendering performance across operating systems using the PBRT-v3 framework to determine if Linux’s attributes lead to better performance than Windows. We tested Windows on bare metal and Linux in various setups (bare metal, virtual machines) using identical hardware, focusing on performance variations in Ubuntu under these conditions. The experiment involved rendering four scenes on each system, analyzing performance based on accelerator (kdtree, bvh) and integrator (path, volpath) parameters. Findings show that “bvh-path” and “bvh-volpath” combinations outperform “kdtree”. Windows 11 is statistically outperformed by other distributions, with Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and native Ubuntu being the most efficient.