Heads up, tech enthusiasts everywhere, for a new version of one of your favorite benchmarks just dropped. Maxon just announced the minty fresh new Cinebench 2026, ready to beat the heck out of your processor and GPU with an updated, more demanding engine.
Cinebench 2026 uses the latest version of the Redshift engine that Maxon says ought to be six times harsher on multi-threaded tests compared to the the previous version. Predictably, the updated engine integrated into the benchmark should also better reflect the real-world demands of 3D artists everywhere, as well as offer better parity between test results and actual render tasks. Maxon notes that scores with the new engine cannot be compared with previous versions of Cinebench.
The new SMT core test should be of particular interest to testers everywhere, including those at our abode. This test specifically runs a single core test procedure on an SMT capable core, so users can get a feel for how good (or bad) their chip's SMT implementation is when compared to single thread execution.
The list of supported hardware got longer, too. The latest generations of AMD and Nvidia consumer cards are all present in the list, which also includes includes Nvidia's Ampere Altra, Hopper, and Blackwell datacenter GPUs, as well as AMD's Radeon Pro series. Owners of Intel graphics chips continue to be out of luck, as those are still not supported by the Redshift engine.
Over at the Apple orchard, the new M4 and M5 chips are now on the list, as you'd expect. While on the topic of Arm-based chips, as with Cinebench 2024, there's an native Windows-on-Arm version, along with support for Nvidia's Ampere Altra CPUs.
The new niceties do come at a price, though an expected one. For GPU testing, only cards with 8GB of more of VRAM need apply. The benchmark now supports Apple's M4 and M5 chips, and given that the M-series machines all use unified memory, Maxon says you'll need 16GB for running the GPU tests. If you're only doing CPU tests on Apple machines, you might get by with 8GB or 12GB, though the company notes that performance might not be up to spec.
Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
