Cinebench is one of the most popular benchmarking tools for graphics cards, allowing you to compare your system’s GPU performance against countless other devices. Now, Cinebench 2026 has arrived with new features and better support for the latest hardware.
Maxon, the company behind Cinebench, Maxon One, Cinema 4D, and other graphics rendering tools, has just released the 2026 edition of its Cinebench software. Just like previous versions, it runs a series of CPU and GPU tests with real-world 3D rendering workloads, and then gives you a numerical score you can compare with other systems.
The main upgrade in this release is full compatibility with newer hardware. Cinebench 2026 supports NVIDIA’s RTX 5000 graphics cards (Blackwell architecture), AMD’s 9000 series GPUs, and NVIDIA’s Hopper and Blackwell data center cards. Apple’s M4 and M5 chips are also fully supported now, with the M3 and later using Metal RT hardware ray tracing.
Maxon also said, “Cinebench 2026 has been updated to the latest Redshift Rendering engine, leveraging technological advancements in Redshift’s development. This also allows users to more accurately predict the performance they can expect in Cinema 4D 2026 based on the results of Cinebench. Thanks to a new test that evaluates the performance of SMT enabled CPU cores, users can directly assess the performance gains offered by SMT compared to single-threaded execution.”
Benchmarking tools like Cinebench are a great way to objectively measure your system’s performance, especially before and after you experiment with overclocking, changing BIOS settings, or upgrading your hardware. It can also be a useful stress test for thermal performance and overclock stability, though some PC games also have a built-in benchmarks that can serve the same purpose.
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Graphics cards have been prohibitively expensive over the past few years, and with the ongoing DRAM shortage likely pushing prices even higher, now may be the right time to consider older GPUs. Prices on the second-hand market have become much more reasonable, and there are still some surprisingly powerful models available for not too much money.
Cinebench 2026 has a different engine with more optimizations than the previous version, so the scores are not comparable across different versions. Maxon said, “With the incorporation of the latest Redshift technology and optimized performance, Cinebench 2026 offers a distinctly enhanced and accurate evaluation of modern hardware capabilities.”
You can download Cinebench 2026 from Maxon’s website as a free download. You need a Windows PC running Windows 10 20H2 or higher, or a Mac with macOS Sonoma 14.7 or later. There’s still no version for Linux, but you can try Geekbench’s GPU benchmark as an alternative.
Source: Maxon via TechPowerUp
