An Early Look At GCC 12 Compiler Performance On The Core i9 12900K

The C-Ray ray-tracer seems to have significantly regressed at the -O2 optimization level.

With a few exceptions where the GCC 12 built binaries were performing measurably lower than GCC 11.2, overall GCC 12 was steadily offering similar or slightly better performance than GCC 11.2 with the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS configurations tested on this Core i9 12900K Alder Lake desktop running an Ubuntu 22.04 snapshot. Stay tuned for further tests of GCC 12 at different optimizations and on more processor families. Let me know any specific CPU / test requests you'd like to see in the forums or on Twitter.