Benchmarks serve as a quick and easy way to compare one device to another on a very limited set of metrics, but they should never be the be-all and end-all of device measurements. They generally show if one device is more powerful than another, but when it comes to software optimization and other improvements, power is usually only one part of the equation. Geekbench 6 is now here, and it's been redesigned and improved to measure the way that you actually use your smartphone in 2023.
The big change with this iteration of Geekbench is that it has updated datasets to better reflect more modern smartphone usage. These changes cover a wide range but include:
- Bigger photos in resolutions captured by modern smartphones (12 to 48MP)
- HTML examples representative of modern web design standards
- A larger library of images for import tests
- Larger maps for navigation tests
- Bigger and more modern PDF examples
- An increase in Clang workload size.
In other words, all of these changes better reflect the smartphone and device usage of 2023, while being close to the workloads that apps process on a day-to-day basis. Primate Labs, the developer of Geekbench, understands that machine learning and other heterogeneous computational workloads are the better metric for a smartphone's performance. As such, new tests have also been added to Geekbench in order to better reflect how we really use our smartphones.
From background blur tests (such as the ones you may use in video calls) to improved raytracing and AI object detection, there are a lot of improvements that will better reflect the actual holistic capabilities of your smartphone. It's not likely that it will solve the overall problem of benchmarks (and how they aren't totally representative), but it further moves in the direction of highlighting that not everything is about raw CPU capability.
On top of that, all non-commercial usage of Geekbench 6 has been made entirely free, though additional functionality like command-line automation, a portable/standalone version, and offline result management are all available in a paid "Pro" version. That version is 20% off for a limited time, costing $79.
As for what's changed, Primate Labs also shared a draft of documentation that details the change in how the test score is conducted. Cryptography has been dropped entirely as a category, which previously made up 5% of the total score. Just like Geekbench 5, a large emphasis is placed on integer performance (65%), with floating point performance being the other 35%.
You can download Geekbench for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows starting from today. For Windows on Arm devices, Geekbench 6.1 will bring support for the AArch64 instruction set, though we don't know when that will be.