You can now torture your PC with the all new Cinebench 2026

While it might not be the best time for PC hardware enthusiasts—with the DRAM crisis and what not—you can still take part in the fun of torturing your hardware with benchmark tests. One such tool is the ever popular Cinebench, which has just been refreshed by Maxon for 2026.

That’s right folks, Cinebench 2026 is now here and ready to destroy your CPU and GPU with its new and improved engine. According to Maxon, Cinebench 2026 has been updated to use the latest Redshift Rendering engine. This means it now better predict the performance users can expect in Cinema 4D 2026 based on their Cinebench results. There’s also a new test that evaluates SMT-enabled CPU cores, giving users a way to directly see the performance gains from SMT vs single-threaded execution.

“Maxon is thrilled to announce the highly anticipated release of Cinebench 2026, its latest iteration of the industry-standard benchmarking software, which has been a cornerstone in computer performance evaluation for two decades.

Widely used by reviewers, hardware manufacturers, and everyday computer owners, Cinebench utilizes the power of Redshift, Cinema 4D’s default rendering engine, to accurately assess and evaluate CPU and GPU performance using real-world 3D rendering workloads,” – Maxon

On top of that, Cinebench 2026 adds compatibility for NVIDIA’s 5000 series Blackwell GPUs as well as AMD Radeon 9000 series GPUs on Windows. You’ll also find support for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell data center GPUs, along with Apple M4 and M5 systems. That’s of course on top of previous support for AMD and Intel x86 CPUs, Apple’s previous M-series processors, Snapdragon platforms and Ampere Altra processors.

One key thing to note is that Cinebench 2026 scores should not be compared to Cinebench scores from previous versions. That’s no surprise of course, considering that compared to Cinebench R23, the computational effort required for the scene has increased by six times. Memory requirements have also gone up; you’ll need at least 16GB of RAM to run Cinebench 2026 on Windows machines. Apple devices will be able to run the CPU test if you have at least 8GB, but for the GPU test you’ll need at least 16GB of unified memory.

For those keen on squeezing the life out of your PC or laptop, you can download Cinebench 2026 by clicking here.

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