This is a simple benchmarking tool written in rust that can show an indicative result of multithreaded performance.
It runs for a configurable amount of iterations simulating Conway's Game of Life generations on a fixed-size buffer. Results are reported in iterations per second.
The program will, by default, run 1024 iterations over a 3840 by 2160 buffer using as many threads as the machine reports.
The work_slice_len which can bee seen in the config file indicates how many items each thread processes when going through the buffer.
A value of 1 would mean that most of CPU cycles are spent in cross-thread IO overhead.
The work_slice_len should be something that ideally fits in your closest CPU cache (considering each item is 1 byte). Default value is 128 * 128.
The accuracy or validity of the results is highly questionable, since it doesn't do any "useful" computations, it's mostly a matter of index math and simple boolean logic.
Use a more complex program to benchmark your PC, such as a game or a raytracer.
This project use Rust stable, so a stable rust toolchain needs to be installed.
See rust installation guide.
The debug version of this tool is extremely slow, so run it using cargo run --release.
To add flags, add a -- after --release, example: cargo run --release -- --help.
More details about flags can be found using the --help or -h flag.
If you want to configure your bencmark run, launch the program with --generate-config <filename?>, which will generate a configuration file.
The file will by default be named benc_config.toml, but you can specify the name yourself (omitting the .toml extension).
The shorthand for --generate-config is -g.
To have the program use said configuration file, you need to run it with the --use-config <filename?> flag.
The program will by default search for the bench_config.toml file, but you can specify your own (again, omitting the .toml extension).
The shorthand for --use-config is -c.
This tool comes with a visualization mode that can be accessed by passing the --visualize <target_framerate?> or --visualise <target_framerate?> flag.
This mode outputs the Game of Life generations to the terminal instead of using it as a benchmark.
The optional target framerate parameter is set to 8 by default. It determines how fast the generations should be shown (although the frametime delay will have the terminal render overhead added to it, making the simulation slower than the target framerate).
The visualization mode does not take into account the configuration file, and will run for usize::MAX iterations, usually stopped by a SIGINT from the user.
The shorthand for --visualize is -v.