Radiance folks,
I'd like to share a recent surprising result. Upgrading from gcc 4.3.2 to 4.4.4 resulted in a ~7-15% performance boost for the Radiance benchmark test on my AMD Phenom system. If you have a similar software/hardware setup as me, and the ability to upgrade your compiler to gcc 4.4.4, I'd strongly suggest doing so. Also, if you have the time to run the benchmark, I'd like to add your results to the database:
http://markjstock.org/pages/rad_bench.html
My system:
AMD Phenom 9850 (4 core at 2.5 GHz)
Fedora 12, gcc 4.4.4
Radiance 4.0 (April) built with
-O2 -ffast-math -funroll-loops
Fun fact: the two benchmarks vary in difficulty by 26.6x, so we can calculate that an 8-core Xeon system from 2008 runs Radiance almost 1000x faster than the oldest computer that I've benchmarked: a 133MHz K-5 in 1999.
Mark