Maxon Releases Cinebench R20 For CPU Beatdowns, How Much Ya Bench?
Maxon has a thing for punishing CPUs with its brutal Cinebench software, which is designed to gauge a system's performance as it relates to professional 3D modeling, animation, and rendering solutions. There is now a new version available, Cinebench R20, which has been designed to more accurately evaluate modern PCs.
"Cinebench R20 reflects our engineering efforts to leverage the advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years," said David McGavran, Maxon Chief Executive Officer. "The updated tests in Cinebench R20 deliver more accurate benchmarking measurements to reflect the performance of today’s CPUs in demanding rendering workloads."
We employ Cinebench in many of our reviews, and will look at updating to the newest build. In the meantime, we were curious how much we could bench with what we have immediately accessible. To find out, we ran the Cinebench R20 on a few setups. Here's a look...
Not surprisingly, more cores equates to better performance, and of course more modern CPU architectures perform better than previous generation ones. The Core i7-4790K Devil's Canyon chip, which is still a formidable CPU for most tasks, gets left in the dust in multi-core performance compared to newer CPU architectures, like the 9th generation Core i7-9700K, a Coffee Lake Refresh part.
Interestingly, Maxon has decided to leave out its OpenGL graphics test for this round and focus solely on CPU performance. The test itself is much larger and more complex than Cinebench R15, and requires around 8x the computation power to render it, Maxon says. The test also incorporates the latest rendering architectures, including Intel's Embree ray tracing technology.
Cooling is more important than ever for this round. The test is designed in part to determine if a system can run stable on a high CPU load, and if the cooling is sufficient for longer running tasks to realize the full potential of the CPU. If it works as advertised, this will be a boon for system reviews, as it will allow us to gauge the performance impact that cooling has on a machine.
In any event, you've seen what we can bench. What about you, how much can YOU bench? You can grab Cinebench R20 from the Microsoft Store (Windows) or Apple App Store (macOS). If you give it a run, let us know your scores and what hardware you're kicking around.
