Interpreting Blender Benchmark Results: What the Numbers Mean

Blender Benchmark: 7 Tests to Measure Your Render Performance

Blender Benchmark is an open-source suite provided by the Blender Foundation to measure and compare render performance across CPUs and GPUs using real Blender scenes. The “7 Tests” format runs seven different scenes and settings that together give a broad view of how hardware performs under varied rendering workloads.

What the 7 tests cover

• Simple scene (low complexity): Fast, GPU-friendly scene to measure baseline render speed.
• Medium complexity scene: Balances geometry, textures, and lighting to test general performance.
• High complexity scene: Heavy geometry and shading to stress memory and compute.
• Path-tracing heavy scene: Long path-depth and many bounces to stress ray-tracing compute.
• GPU-accelerated shader scene: Uses advanced shaders to benchmark GPU shading throughput.
• CPU-focused scene: Designed to exercise CPU ray-tracing and multi-threading performance.
• Hybrid workload scene: Mixes CPU/GPU tasks (simulation, compositing) to show real-world performance.

How scores are reported

• Each test produces a render time; lower is better.
• Results are often converted into a normalized score so different hardware can be directly compared.
• Overall score is typically an aggregate (geometric mean) of the seven test times to reduce skew from outliers.

How to run it

1. Download Blender Benchmark from the official Blender Benchmark site.
2. Install and open the app; sign in or run anonymously.
3. Select CPU, GPU, or both; pick the preset scene set (7 tests) and start.
4. Wait for all renders to complete; results will display and can be uploaded to the public database.

Tips to interpret and improve results

• Compare similar hardware: Match like-for-like (same GPU family, same CPU core counts).
• Thermals matter: Ensure proper cooling—thermal throttling skews results.
• Driver and Blender version: Use the latest stable drivers and the same Blender build as the benchmark.
• Background processes: Close other apps to avoid interference.
• Repeat runs: Run multiple times and use the median to reduce variability.

Use cases

• Choosing a new CPU/GPU for Blender work.
• Verifying system upgrades or cooling improvements.
• Comparing cloud render instances.
• Sharing reproducible, comparable performance numbers with colleagues.