The Star Benchmark

For TOPBENCH’s 5th anniversary, I thought I would out the easter egg I snuck in around version 0.33:  The Star Benchmark.  In the 1990s, I always thought it would be cute to see how many 60Hz 3-D stars would be possible on a system, but I didn’t implement it until TOPBENCH.  To see how many “stars” your system can produce, use “starbench” as the only command-line argument:

topbench starbench

…and your system will display increasingly more and more 3-D stars until doing so would cause flicker or slowdown.  After viewing the display a bit, hit a key and the number of stars your system could produce will be displayed.  If the number is followed by “(maximum!)”, then congratulations, your system “wins”.  (There is no prize for winning!)