Maxon, developers of professional software solutions for editors, filmmakers, motion designers, visual effects artists and creators of all types, is thrilled to announce the highly anticipated release of Cinebench 2024. This latest iteration of the industry-standard benchmarking software, which has been a cornerstone in computer performance evaluation for two decades, sets a new standard for performance evaluation, embracing cutting-edge technology to provide artists, designers, and creators with a more accurate and relevant representation of their hardware capabilities.

Redshift Rendering Engine Integration
Cinebench 2024 ushers in a new era by embracing the power of Redshift, Cinema 4D's default rendering engine. Unlike its predecessors, which utilized Cinema 4D's standard renderer, Cinebench 2024 utilizes the same render algorithms across both CPU and GPU implementations. This leap to the Redshift engine ensures that performance testing aligns seamlessly with the demands of modern creative workflows, delivering accurate and consistent results.

Maxon, developers of professional software solutions for editors, filmmakers, motion designers, visual effects artists and creators of all types, announced today a comprehensive update to Maxon One. Maxon's Spring 2023 release offers exciting new features and workflow enhancements across the entire product line, that will empower designers and artists to turn their creative ideas into reality with stunning results. Cinema 4D 2023.2 offers an improved Commander, enhancements to its Nodes system, simulation improvements and a new Thicken generator for modeling. Updates to the Red Giant toolset feature new tools and augmentations; most notably the introduction of Symbol Mapper for Universe 2023.1, anamorphic lens support for Real Lens Flares for VFX 2023.3, and Trapcode 2023.3 includes performance optimizations for Particular and a new collection of Atomic Age sprites.

Redshift 3.5.14 brings a fantastic new Sky and Sun Model, a new Flakes Shader and new Camera Backplates. The latest release of ZBrush is highlighted by two new revolutionary workflow tools, Proxy Pose and Drop 3D. Forger updates include new features for lighting and previews, and the integration of ZBrush's powerful ZRemesher. The latest additions to Capsules include new material collections, a new dynamic Swirl Modifier and a new Redshift Shaderball. Rounding out this exciting release is an update to Cineware, focused on Unreal 5.0 and 5.1 integration.

Maxon has recently released Cinebench R23 with an updated codebase to more closely reflect real-world Cinema 4D performance. Cinebench brings support for Apple silicon with the ARM-based M1 processor found in the latest generation Apple MacBooks. The benchmark now features a minimum runtime of 10 minutes to ensure the system reaches peak temperatures and measures a more realistic performance estimate. This change will reduce the scores for systems that throttle under sustained loads. The scores from Cinebench R23 are not comparable to scores from previous versions including Cinebench R20.

Cinebench R23 can now be downloaded for free from Maxon (250 MB).

Apple today introduced the all-new Mac Pro, a completely redesigned, breakthrough workstation for pros who push the limits of what a Mac can do, and unveiled Apple Pro Display XDR, the world's best pro display. Designed for maximum performance, expansion and configurability, the all-new Mac Pro features workstation-class Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with a massive 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture featuring the world's most powerful graphics card. It also introduces Apple Afterburner, a game-changing accelerator card that enables playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously.

Pro Display XDR features a massive 32-inch Retina 6K display with gorgeous P3 wide and 10-bit color, an extreme 1,600 nits of peak brightness, an incredible 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a superwide viewing angle, all at a breakthrough price point. Together, the new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR are the most powerful tools Apple has ever put in the hands of pro customers and will change pro workflows forever.

Originally Cinebench R20 was released to the Microsoft Store which as you can probably guess caused a bit of negative PR for Maxon due to the benchmarks popularity within the enthusiast community. What really seemed to fuel the fire was the fact it was always freely distributed just about everywhere even here on TechPowerUp. Fast forward to the latest release and with it being locked to a digital walled garden of sorts really didn't sit too well within the community. However, it did not take long for enterprising enthusiasts to discover you could make it standalone.

This prompted Maxon to request the hosted files be taken down which generated quite the discussion within our own forums both for and against the move. Yet in the end, Maxon's reasoning behind their decision still remains a bit perplexing and with little clarity. Even more so now as the company has released there very own standalone version. Which leads us to wonder why they went about doing things in this circuitous manner in the first place. Still, this standalone release will likely be met with much more fanfare, well that is if the download link pointed to the right files. Currently, the official download page will direct users to a Mac .dmg file, which seems to be a copy and paste mistake. We figured out the correct link, it's listed below.Download: Maxon Cinebench R20

Maxon last week week posted its Cinebench R20 CPU benchmark. Breaking convention, the company behind rendering software such as Cinema 4D R20, did not host the installer of Cinebench R20 on its own website. Instead, the software is being exclusively distributed through Microsoft Store (for Windows) and Apple App Store (for the MacOS platform). Several reputable PC enthusiast websites such as Guru3D and us, were bombarded by comments from their readers that they didn't like having to get their Cinebench R20 copy from "walled garden DRM platforms," and instead preferred portable versions of the software. Cinebench R20 is freeware, and so with good intentions, many PC enthusiast websites decided to build portable versions of Cinebench R20 that people can just unzip and run. Maxon did not take kindly to this.

Guru3D received legal threats from Maxon to take down their download hosting of Cinebench R20 portable. Facing these threats, Guru3D took down their download and amended their news articles with links to the Microsoft DRM store. The e-mail we received politely asked us to remove the "unauthorized download" but did include a threat that the company "reserves the next legal steps." We believe this behavior by Maxon is unfair, and will alienate a section of PC enthusiasts form Cinebench. No record-seeking PC enthusiast with an LN2 bench painstakingly set up has time to plug their machine to the Internet, launch the UWP store, evade attempts to get them to log in with a Microsoft account, and fetch Cinebench R20 with versions they have no control over. They'd rather install and run their benchmarks and tools off a flash drive, with control over versions, and the ability to keep their machines offline to stabilize their overclock. Many others simply hate DRM platforms for freeware. TechPowerUp has since taken down Cinebench R20 portable from its Downloads section. You can find it on Microsoft UWP Store.

Maxon Tuesday unveiled its Cinebench R20 benchmark designed to test CPU performance at photorealistic rendering using the company's Cinema 4D R20 technology. The benchmark runs on any PC with at least 4 GB of memory and SSE3 instruction-set support, although it can scale across any number of cores, memory, and supports exotic new instruction-sets such as AVX2. Maxon describes Cinebench R20 as using four times the memory, and eight times the CPU computational power as Cinebench R15. The benchmark implements Intel Embree ray-tracing engine. Maxon is distributing Cinebench R20 exclusively through the Microsoft Store on the Windows platform.

Unlike its predecessor, Cinebench R20 lacks a GPU test. The CPU test scales by the number of CPU cores and SMT units available. It consists of a tiled rendering of a studio apartment living room scene by Render Baron, which includes ray-traced elements, high resolution textures, illumination, and reflections. The number of logical processors available determines the number of rendering instances. The benchmark does indeed have a large memory footprint, and rewards HTT or SMT and high clock-speeds, as our own quick test shows. A 4-core/8-thread Core i7-7700K beats our Core i5-9400F 6-core/6-thread processor.

Update (11th March): We have removed the portable version download at Maxon's request.DOWNLOAD: Maxon Cinebench R20 (Microsoft Store)

AMD today unveiled its big annual driver releases for its consumer-graphics Radeon line, and the professional-graphics Radeon Pro and FirePro lines. The BAR (big annual release) for the latter is titled AMD Radeon Pro Adrenalin Edition 17.12.1 WHQL, and introduces a slew of new features that add value to the company's FirePro and Radeon Pro graphics cards. Since its 2016 BAR (Radeon Pro Crimson ReLive), the company's regular driver updates for enterprises achieved a predictable cadence of the 2nd Wednesday of the 2nd month of each quarter, capped off with a big annual release in December, besides prioritized 24x7 support. This, AMD claims, has been well received by its customers.

With the Radeon Pro Adrenalin Edition, AMD is expanding its software in four key directions - Pro Render, Pro Settings, New Driver Options, and Virtualization. It also chronicles driver releases over 2017 have gradually increased performance levels by up to 16 percent compared to last year's big annual release. AMD expanded the feature-set of ProRender, its in-house and highly modular 3D rendering engine for CAD designers and 3D artists, including its support for Maxon Cinema 4D; interactive viewport de-noising for Blender; a new Game Engine Importer extension that can import geometry and materials in real-time from SolidWorks to Unreal Engine; accelerating VR ports of popular games and professional 3D scenes; and a set of additional features such as PBR Shader for Blender. The drivers also add macOS support for Maya and Blender, which will be implemented "soon," along with support for 2018 releases of 3DSMax and Maya.

Maxon posted Cinebench R15, the latest version of its CPU and GPU benchmark, popularized by its multi-threaded CPU tests. Available exclusively for 64-bit systems running Windows and OS X, Cinebench R15 features an upgraded renderer based on the company's Cinema 4D software, new test scenes, and a new scoring system. The CPU test utilizes up to 256 logical CPUs to render a 3D scene with approximately 2,000 objects, and over 300,000 polygons, with photo-realistic blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, and antialiasing.DOWNLOAD: MAXON Cinebench R15