Geekbench 7 is out now with new, modern workloads and better multi-core tests

Macworld

It’s not easy to make a quick, reliable benchmark that works across architectures and operating systems. There’s a reason Geekbench has been sort of the gold standard for comparing overall CPU performance over the years, and to a lesser degree, GPU compute performance.

On Thursday, around three years after the release of Geekbench 6, Primate Labs is releasing Geekbench 7. To better represent the demands of modern applications, it includes new workload tests, a redesigned multi-core benchmark, and a new GPU benchmark. The benchmarks operate on larger data sets as well, again better representing the demands of modern applications.

New media workloads include encoding screen-sharing video with the AV1 codec, compressing music and speech with the Opus audio codec, and decoding audio and video while using the Whisper speech recognition model to generate live captions. Other new test include Game Physics, an updated Photo editing test, and new Photo library tests that processes JPEG XL and DNG formats.

The multi-core tests are especially changed, redesigned to “better reflect how real applications behave,” according to Primate Labs. Instead of forcing a series of exclusively multi-threaded tasks, which produces a distorted view of performance, the Geekbench 7 tests only include tests in the multi-threaded benchmark if it’s highly multi-threaded in real life.

The example Primate Labs gives is the HTML5 Browser test–web browsers and the tasks they run are typically highly dependent on single-thread performance, so it’s not included in the multi-threaded tests.

The GPU benchmarks are still focused on the compute applications for GPUs rather than on real-time 3D graphics rendering, but the types of applications have evolved. The tests now focus on the content creation and machine learning uses of GPUs, since those dominate GPU compute applications. For example: tracking faces in video, upscaling images using machine learning algorithms, or blurring the backgro…