The Blender Foundation is wrapping up development on Blender 2.8, “The Workflow Update”. We have been following it for a while, but today’s announcement caught me by surprise: a benchmark database. It seems simple, right? Blender wants its users to know what hardware is best to use, especially when rendering images in Cycles (which can be damn slow).

A bit lopsided…

The solution is to make a version of Blender that creates and validates benchmarks, then compiles the data on their website. It’s still early days for this, with just 2052 entries (at the time of writing) and the  majority of those were from Linux boxes. Also, they only break it down into a handful of categories: Fastest CPU, Fastest Compute Device, Submissions Per OS, then a few charts that compare the individual benchmark scenes against one another in a hardware-agnostic fashion. They pledge to add a lot of more metrics in the future.

Personally, I’m curious to see a performance vs OS metric. Some benchmarks back from 2016 (Blender 2.77 on an EVGA GTX 980 Ti) show Linux out-performing Windows 10 by over 2x, with Windows 7 landing in between (closer to Linux than Windows 10). At the time, it was attributed to NVIDIA’s CUDA driver being horribly optimized for the newer OS, which seems to be validated by the close showing of the GTX 1080 on Windows 10 and Linux, but I would like to see a compiled list of up-to-date results. I could soon be able to.