CINEBENCH R15

Maxon CINEBENCH is a real-world test suite that assesses the computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on Maxon’s award-winning animation software, Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. Maxon software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars,The Chronicles of Narnia, and many more. CINEBENCH Release 11.5 includes the ability to more accurately test the industry’s latest hardware, including systems with up to 64 processor threads, and the testing environment better reflects the expectations of today’s production demands. A more streamlined interface makes testing systems and reading results incredibly straightforward.

The CINEBENCH R11.5 test scenario comprises three tests: an OpenGL-based test that models a simple car chase (which I didn’t use for this test, since the graphics card performs most of the rendering work, and I’m testing the CPU), and single-core and multi-core versions of a CPU-bound computation using all of a system’s processing power to render a photo-realistic 3D scene, “No Keyframes”, the viral animation by AixSponza. This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores, and all rendering is performed by the CPU: the graphics card is not involved except as a display device. The multi-core version of the rendering benchmark uses as many cores as the processor has, including the “virtual cores” in processors that support Hyper-Threading. The resulting “CineMark” is a dimensionless number only useful for comparisons with results generated from the same version of CINEBENCH.

The first benchmark renders the scene using only a single core. Overclocking the FX-8320E gets us another 10% or so in this test, but the Intel chip is half again as fast simply based on its superior core architecture.

The multi-core rendering test, though, shows that cores count…and they count for a lot. The Core i3-4360 score more than doubles (the result of Hyper-Threading), but it simply can’t compete with the 8 real cores of the AMD FX CPUs.

The OpenGL portion of CineBench produces a surprise: the Intel CPU wins decisively. We see nice result scaling with the overclocking of the AMD FX CPUs, but this is obviously not a test that can make use of multiple cores.

Let’s start the gaming-oriented testing with Unigine Heaven 4.0…