Microsoft killed Silverlight in 2012, and as you may have noticed the Internet Explorer is the last browser that supports it. So as the result, less and less users are using SilverBench to benchmark or stress test their PCs. Today we are launching SilverBench v2 rewritten entirely in the JavaScript, so you can now benchmark any device that has a web browser.
We have also taken a step further, and instead of Ray tracing we are now using Photon mapping. And Photon mapping is a way slower, so the Stress test runs even slower while still consuming 100% of all the CPU cores. Also, the Silverlight by design allowed us to use only one CPU socket. We are now using JavaScript Web Workers, and in theory this should scale across any number of CPU sockets, but we have not tested this yet. Update: We tested, and it works across multiple CPUs.
Original source code taken from Kevin Beason’s smallpt project which we rewrote into JavaScript. More info and credits here.