For over a decade, Cinebench has been a standard tool for evaluating graphics hardware performance, both for individual users looking to test their systems and for studios. Previous versions of Cinebench were based on the Standard Render engine in Cinema 4D, which is developed by Maxon, the company behind Cinebench. In Cinebench 2024, this system has been replaced with Redshift, a high-performance rendering engine that Maxon acquired in 2019 and is now the preferred rendering engine in Cinema 4D.
Since Redshift was originally developed as a GPU renderer, the update brings back the GPU benchmark, as Maxon had removed the previous GPU benchmark in 2019. It supports all major GPU models, except for the new Intel Arc A series cards: in Windows - AMD and NVIDIA, and in macOS - AMD and Apple.

Redshift now serves as both a CPU and GPU renderer, and Cinebench 2024 can utilize a single universal scene to evaluate both CPU and GPU performance. The benchmark supports the x86/64 architecture used in AMD and Intel processors on Windows, as well as the ARM64 architecture used in Apple Silicon on macOS and Snapdragon processors on Windows.
In Cinebench 2024, the complexity of the reference scene has been significantly increased to represent assets currently used in the industry. The memory footprint has tripled, with a minimum requirement of 16GB, but the scene actually uses 6.5 to 8.5GB of RAM, and computational efforts have increased sixfold.

The transition to Redshift should also make Cinebench more representative of a broader range of workflows. Redshift, which is also available for 3ds Max, Blender, Houdini, and Maya, is used for animation, VFX, motion graphics, and visualization. Clearly, given the change in rendering engine and the test scene, along with other code and compiler changes, the update breaks compatibility.
According to Maxon's statement, Cinebench 2024 scores have been "retuned to a new range" and should not be compared to results from previous versions.

Cinebench 2024 is available for free on Windows 10 and above and macOS 11.7.7 and above. The software runs on AMD and Intel graphics processors, as well as AMD, Apple, and NVIDIA GPUs.