Cinebench, DX12, Vulkan... What?

[TyFilms]

I am fairly new to PCs, and I look at a lot of reviews for the parts I'm going to buy. I was watching an i5 6400 comparison to another CPU, and they texted in something called Cinebench. What is that? i tried Googling it, but I still couldn't understand. So I'm asking this question for someone to explain what all these weird things are. Cinebench, DX12, Vulkan, Geekbench, and anything else.

[bgibbz]

In short- benchmarking software. 

 

Essentially, the PC world wanted a way to gain tangible, readable numbers to score a system. If you want to know how fast a runner is, you look at there time. Similarly, if you want to know the performance of a computer (or part) is you look at benchmarks. There is a variety of benchmarking softwares out there. Cinebench is a very popular CPU benchmark utility, and geek bench is a another utility. 

 

Dx-12 and vulkan are called APIs. These are essentially interfaces used to program games and other 3D applications. 

 

 

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