Tiny Linux raytracing CPU benchmark (WIP)
4This video is intentionally silent. Sorry about that.
While waiting for a video card with true ray tracing I decided to make a tiny Linux based x86 benchmark with nice real time generated ray traced picture. The benchmark supposed to be suitable for both old and new computers with old and new video cards compatible with single core and multi-core CPUs. It already works on Pentium 1, Athlon XP, Pentium 4, and Core 2 Duo just fine. First idea is to get rough and unscientific estimate how one CPU is faster than another in terms of real world application. Second idea is to make it as small as possible to boot quickly from USB/CD/network like famous memtest. Current size of Tiny Core distro including this benchmark is just 7Mb!
The raytracer source was grabbed from scratchpixel's Introduction to Ray Tracing: a Simple Method for Creating 3D Images
https://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-rendering/introduction-to-ray-tracing/ray-tracing-practical-example
Framebuffer source code from Fred Eckert https://gist.github.com/FredEckert
I put both together and add some mulithread code (almost like described in this article https://habr.com/company/neobit/blog/181626/). Two threads on real machine with two cores are not faster than one thread. This phenomenon us called false caching. It seems like I'm suffering from it :(