Tag Archives: benchmarks
Benchmarking your code
Benchmarking your code is very important since it allows you to pinpoint bottlenecks in your application and allows you to improve the overall performance of your software as well as learning which techniques are more taxing than others.
For this example we are going to be using the Stopwatch class. This class will enable us to see how many milliseconds it required for our code to be executed so we can compare different methods or techniques.
As an example, the code below checks the performance difference of a try/catch block in a loop vs the performance when not using one. Keep in mind that try/catch blocks are not that performance heavy if they don’t actually catch something but the performance gets hit a lot in cases a lot of exceptions are being thrown.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 | Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch(); int test; //test 1 sw.Start(); test = 0; for (int i = 0; i < int.MaxValue; i++) { test = i; } Console.WriteLine(sw.ElapsedMilliseconds); // 7644 sw.Reset(); //test 2 sw.Start(); test = 0; for (int i = 0; i < int.MaxValue; i++) { try { test = i; } catch { } } Console.WriteLine(sw.ElapsedMilliseconds); // 8429 sw.Reset(); |
For even better results I would advise running each test 3 to 5 times and simply calculating the average time of execution.
Unigine releases Heaven 4.0 benchmark
Unigine has released a new version of Heaven, a DirectX 11 graphics benchmark.
The new version offers a number of new features such as:
- Extreme hardware stability testing
- Accurate results due to 100% GPU-bound benchmarking
- Benchmarking presets for convenient comparison of results
- Support for DirectX 9, DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0
- Multi-Platform support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
- Comprehensive use of hardware tessellation, with adjustable settings
- Dynamic sky with volumetric clouds and tweakable day-night cycle
- Real-time global illumination and screen-space ambient occlusion
- Cinematic and interactive fly/walk-through camera modes
- Support for multi-monitor configurations
- Various stereo 3D modes
- GPU temperature and clock monitoring
- Command line automation support
- Highly customizable reports in CSV format
- Support for software rendering mode in DirectX 11 for reference purposes
- Support for English, Russian and Chinese languages
System Requirements
- ATI Radeon HD 4xxx and higher, NVIDIA GeForce 8xxx and higher, or Intel HD 3000 and higher
- Video memory: 512 Mb
- Disk space: 1 Gb
- Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8, Linux (proprietary video drivers required), or Mac OS X 10.8+ (Mountain Lion)
There are three versions currently available .
- Free version which can be downloaded from http://unigine.com/products/heaven/download/
- Advanced (9.59 GBP / 14.95 USD)
- Professional (317.68 GBP / 495.00 USD)
Posted in Software Releases.
Tagged benchmarks, Heaven, Heaven 4.0, Unigine
3DMark 11 is now available
Futuremark has released a new version of the known benchmark software 3DMark.
The new version consists of six new benchmark tests which make extensive use of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.
Available Benchmarks
- Deep Sea 1
- Deep Sea 2
- High Temple 1
- High Temple 2
- Physics test
- Combined test
Graphic test using lights with no tessellation.
Graphic test using tessellation, post processing, depth of field and other camera lens effects.
Graphic test using lights and tessellation.
Graphic test with high tessellation usage.
Multi-theaded CPU heavy benchmark with minimal impact on the GPU.
All around benchmark, that tests both the GPU and CPU using object collision, tessellation, volumetric lighting and post processing effects.
Minimum Requirements
- OS: Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7
- Processor: 1.8GHz dual-core Intel or AMD CPU
- Memory: 1 GB of system memory
- Graphics: DirectX 11 compatible graphics card
- Hard drive space: 1.5 GB
- Audio: Windows Vista / Windows 7 compatible sound card
There is a free edition available at http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/download
Posted in Software Releases.
Tagged 3DMark, 3DMark 11, benchmarks, Futuremark
