Is this the most demanding 3D benchmark test yet?

The Blender Institute has released what we think may be the most demanding off-the-shelf benchmark test yet for graphics workstations: a 240MB Blender scene file from its upcoming ‘open movie’ Cosmos Laundromat.

Even on a 28-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 v3 processor, the CPU render test takes almost 19 minutes to complete, and on a more standard eight-core Core i7-930, that figure rises to well over two hours.

(For comparison, the CPU render test in the Cinebench synthetic benchmark typically takes under a minute, and even our very own processor torturer Jason Lewis’s custom benchmarks rarely take more than an hour.)

Try for yourself
If you want to try the benchmark for yourself, you’ll need to be running Blender 2.74, and to have 8-12GB of RAM.

The file is still a 1.0 release, so the Blender Institute is soliciting feedback on future updates, and is working on an add-on that will automatically report test results to a central repository.

The scene already features some fairly demanding hair and fur, but both the light bounces and motion blur will be stepped up for the version used in the film itself, originally codenamed ‘Project Gooseberry’.

Download the benchmark file from the Cosmos Laundromat website
(Report your own test results in the comments on the post)