BenchMate 12 introduces two new benchmarks, CINEBENCH 2024 for CPU and y-cruncher Pi-BBP. It officially supports the upcoming Zen 5 platform and brings several improvements for HWBOT submission as well as bugfixes.

The biggest effort was made to integrate CINEBENCH 2024. This is a huge benchmark with a completely new way of rendering using MAXON's Redshift renderer. Days went into reverse engineering the workload to fully understand what is going on and how BenchMate can ensure the integrity of the benchmark and capture its result. Only the CPU category is currently supported as HWBOT has no interest for the GPU part yet. I also tried to slim down the benchmark as much as possible to keep the download size of BenchMate to a minimum.

The second benchmark is y-cruncher's new workload called Pi-BPP. It was introduced with y-cruncher 0.8.5 and calculates Pi, but only a few digits of it very far behind the comma. This is basically what GPUPI does, but with a level of optimization I will never be able to provide. Pi-BBP is a CPU-heavy, long running workload, that needs less RAM than the current y-cruncher Pi categories, that calculate all digits of Pi. Although it supports up to AVX512, it should not get as choked up by memory bandwidth. I am sure this will be an interesting workload to play with. I proposed to add the categories 1B (fits for legacy), 10B (multithreaded Super PI-ish) and 100B (long running) to be added to HWBOT.

The y-cruncher integration was also rewritten to be more robust and more secure. Each result is now checked against y-cruncher's own validation file to detect if the result is 100% valid. BenchMate now also supports y-cruncher version 0.8.3 and 0.8.4.

In addition I was able to add several improvements for online and offline submission to HWBOT. We are basically back to the first implementation from years ago, where you fill in the CPU or GPU for yourself if it is not found in the HWBOT database. You can also be sure now that the result file can be uploaded to HWBOT, because BenchMate now reduces the screenshot's size below 2 MB if necessary.

Here is the full changelog for BenchMate 12.1:

Benchmarks

• CINEBENCH 2024 for CPU
• y-cruncher
• Supports versions 0.8.3, 0.8.4 and 0.8.5
• BenchMate is bundled now with version 0.8.5 with Zen 5 optimization and new Pi-BBP workload
• New benchmark Pi-BBP with the categories 1B, 10B and 100B
• Improved result validation of all categories by parsing and evaluating the validation file

Features & Improvements

• Improved HWBOT screenshot upload by automatically reducing the resulting screenshot size to a lower resolution to keep them below 2 MB. This will add CPU load to the capture process, so you will see a warning before this is really done.
• Added screenshot quality and size limit to the options dialog to give users the knobs to optimize their screenshots and circumvent the automatic behaviour
• Improved result dialog location to adhere to various taskbar settings (autohide, different position)
• Missing motherboard information will not produce invalid results anymore (can happen with OEM motherboards)
• Improved HWBOT submission error handling (CPU/GPU not found in database will not be rejected anymore)
• Improved handling of failed installation validation on startup with automatic update of root certificates
• Added architecture detection for Intel Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, Zen 4, Zen 5
• Added codenames to architecture detection for AMD Zen (shown in result dialog)
• Detect and support Zhaoxin and Centaur CPUs
• Update to HWiNFO 8.05: support for Granite Ridge (Zen 5), improved support for Threadripper 7000 series and 14900KS
• Updated tools: CPU-Z 2.1.0 (2.10), GPU-Z 2.59, HWiNFO 8.05

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that sets the wrong result time leading to incorrect sorting of entries in the result list
• Fixed a possible app crash when the result dialog is closed with ESC during screenshots are taken and encoded
• Fixed a bug in the ACPI PM Timer implementation that prevented to launch BenchMate

Download

It's publicly available on the website: https://benchmate.org

Thank you

A big thank you goes out to ASUS, ASRock and Intel, that provided the necessary hardware to be able to develop and test this release!