Cinebench is an application designed for testing the performance of computer components, which is based on the engine of the award-winning Cinema 4D animation software from Maxon. The tool compares processor (CPU) and graphics (GPU) performance on different systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). The biggest advantage of Cinebench is that it is completely free, both for home and commercial use.

The CPU test uses all the power of the CPU to generate a photorealistic 3D scene. It is possible to measure the performance of up to 64 threads. The generated scene contains about 2000 objects, which in turn contain about 300 thousand polygons.

The result is displayed in points. The more points the faster the processor is. The GPU test uses a dynamic 3D car chase scene that measures the performance of the graphics card in OpenGL mode.

Performance depends on many factors, such as the GPU or drivers. The graphics card has to display about 1 million polygons with a large number of textures using various effects such as environment, bump maps, trasnsparency or lighting. The result is given as the average frame rate (FPS).

The program requires 1 GB of RAM and an OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphics card with its own 128 MB memory.