Cinebench R11.5 Benchmarks

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 uses all of a system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene, "No Keyframes" the viral animation by AixSponza. This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The OpenGL graphics card testing procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase with which the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode is measured. During the benchmark tests the graphics card is evaluated by way of displaying an intricate scene that includes complex geometry, high-resolution textures, and a variety of effects to evaluate the performance across a variety of real-world scenarios.

Its readily apparent that the single core tests are right in line with the actual processer clock speed. The scores consistently reflect that. The one thing that had me a little confused with these tests was the slightly lower performance of the Athlon-II X3-445 below that of the X2-255 with the same clock speed. The reason must be the lower cache per core on the Athlon-II x3-445, but oddly enough, when I ran the same tests using the ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO motherboard, the two CPUs scored exactly the same at 0.91 on the single core test. Either way, the Cinebench single CPU test clearly shows us that the Athlon-II X2-260 is the superior CPU, most likely due to the clock speed. The X3-445, when overclocked to 3.9GHz manages to eke out a tiny win over the X2-260 at 3.6GHz.

The OpenGL tests in Cinebench force processor-first graphics computation before offloading work to the available video card. Cinebench R11.5 reveals performance results illustrated in the chart below:

I have to admit that I greatly puzzled by the results of the OpenGL tests. I can see the marked increase from both the Athlon-II X3-445 and the Athlon-II X2-260 when they are overclocked, but I'm not really sure why the Athlon-II X3-445 performs so much more poorly than both of the Athlon-II X2 processors. I had assumed originally that this was probably due to the smaller cache size, as this tests supposedly pushes as much information to the processor for rendering as it can handle before offloading to the GPU. The total L2 cache is only 512KB per core on the Athlon-II X3-445 compared to 1MB per core on both of the Athlon-II X2 processors. But this theory was kind of blown out of the water by the low performance of the i7 920 processor. I ran the tests many times more than the normal 5 times, but I consistently encountered the same result. In any event, I will have to look more deeply into the matter, especially for future reviews.

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