The software is currently in beta, but the testing code itself is stable and not likely to change.
Much like how Cinebench is based off of Cinema 4D, The blender benchmarking software is based on a stripped down version of the stable 2.79b blender build.
For the full details in video form you can watch this developer overview:
There are two tests to run on this benchmark, Quick Test and Complete Test.
The Quick Test generally takes about 30 minutes on most modern machines while the complete test can take several hours.
*For some reason, some of the tests in the Complete Benchmark where actually skipped on the i5 6440HQ and when I tried to rerun this benchmark, the program crashed. Something must have gone wrong here.
I challenge the forum to test their systems with this benchmark.
The latest criticisms of Cinebech of course revolve around super high core count CPUs that complete the benchmark too fast to even heat up. This provides a real parallel workload that will not fail to stress them appropriately.
18 Core Xeon and then a 2700 just below that, looks like there might be some beta software issues being sorted out. Or someone is gaming the submissions system.
Yeah, those don’t make sense, I got larger discrepancies comparing an i5 6440HQ to a R5 2500U even though both CPUs should be very close. My 6440HQ Complete Test ran weird and even actually skipped a couple of parts.
I think it’s a nice initiative from blender, essentially we have a new cinebench competitor on the scene and I think it’s worth bringing attention to a good open software initiative. Something that can have a real effect on hardware testing in future.