A message from the moderating team

TLDR; For all Cinebench benchmarks the rendering scene must be entirely visible in the screenshot and atering benchmark files or the rendering is not allowed

A while ago it came to our attention that there is a modified version of Cinebench around with altered textures which have as main effect to reduce the workload and consequently inflate the benchmark score.

The texture modification can be easily seen when comparing the scene rendered with altered textures with a scene rendered with original textures. Generally altering benchmark files is not acceptable for any benchmark. The so-called "Tex tweak" or "Tex mod pack" resizes the set of cinebench textures from 2928x1810px down up to 4x2px. Over the past days Christian Ney tried many different modifications to the textures files and found the following:

• The texture file alteration can boost the score from a mere 0.1% up to 200%
• Most of the time texture modification result in worse performance
• Modifications that brought more than 1% are easily detectable when comparing rendering scenes
• Below 1%, it's not evident but it is detectable as well
• On average texture modification boosts the score by 1-2%

As a consequence of the findings, the moderating staff has update the benchmark rules for Cinebench R11.5 and Cinebench R15 and will proceed with the following steps:

• Global points will be removed temporarily
• Screenshots with the rendered scene not entirely visible will no longer be accepted
• Old scores with the rendered scene not entirely visible will be blocked if they look too efficient for the system
• Old scores where the rendered scene looks altered will be blocked

The moderating staff will do its best to ensure the integrity of the benchmark leaderboards after the sweep. If you find submissions that the staff may have missed, feel free to report the scores and let us know. We appreciate your help and support!

The HWBOT Staff