Benchmarking GCC 4.2 Through GCC 4.8 On AMD & Intel Hardware

The single-threaded POV-Ray ray-tracing benchmark has improved with GCC 4.7 and 4.8.

The Tachyon results are not too interesting.

Overall, GCC tends to do a good job at not regressing for x86 targets with newer GCC releases, but it is not regression free. For a vast majority of the test cases, the benchmarks show GCC 4.7 and the forthcoming GCC 4.8 do offer performance improvements over older versions of this open-source compiler.