Cinebench 2026 Arrives With Support for Blackwell GPUs, Apple M5 & Snapdragon X
It's easy to think of Cinebench as a purely synthetic benchmark given the way it works: you download a dedicated benchmark application, you run it from whatever folder, and it does its thing before spitting out a number that vaguely tells you how your system performs. That feels similar to synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark, which aren't directly related to any particular real-world application. Cinebench isn't synthetic, though; it's based on the Redshift renderer used in Maxon's Cinema4D modeling software. There's a new version of Intel's favorite benchmark out, and this one promises to punish Apple and Qualcomm CPUs alongside AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.
One of the weaknesses of Cinebench 24 as a benchmark was its limited hardware support. x86-64 CPUs on Windows, NVIDIA GPU from recent generations, and... that was about it. The new version brings with it new test scenes that the company says are six times more punishing than the previous scenes, and it also comes along with new hardware support. You're still limited to Windows or MacOS—no official Linux support yet—but the new version of the app supports Windows on Arm devices as well as Apple's M4 and M5 processors.
AMD GPUs are now supported, too, although apparently only if you have a Radeon RX 9000 series GPU. We attempted to run the test on a system here with a Radeon RX 7800 XT, and it would not allow us to run the GPU test. That's a little surprising considering that Maxon's Redshift officially supports AMD's GPUs going back to at least RDNA 2, although it's possible that a Pro driver is required. Either way, Radeon RX 9000 series cards should work for the GPU testing.
Of course, CPU testing is the bread and butter of Cinebench, and that doesn't change with the new release. In fact, Cinebench 26 actually adds a new test for CPUs that is intended to test the merit of SMT on a particular architecture. This comes at an interesting time, as Intel has entirely dropped Hyper-Threading (Intel's name for SMT) support in its recent consumer CPUs. It will be interesting to see the results from this test across various processor architectures.
Naturally, you can't compare scores in the new Cinebench version to older releases of the software. Scores will be worse on systems with less than 16GB of memory as paging enters the equation; Maxon says the minimum requirement 16GB of RAM, and 8GB of video RAM if you want to do GPU testing. If you're keen to fool around with the new Cinebench release, grab the 4GB download from Maxon and let us know your hardware and what you scored!
Top image from Maxon's 2025 Cinema 4D Demo Reel.
