Geekbench 6 vs Geekbench 5: Which version is best for you?
Every year, new devices come out with alleged improvements in performance. We see CPU and GPU clock speeds moving up. Fabrication processes improve each year, and efficiency per watt keeps getting better.
With smartphones, we saw a slight hiatus with the Snapdragon 888 and 8 Gen 1 on the Android side, but the 8 Gen 2 brings enormous gains. Apple’s laptop chips in 2020 pushed Intel to come back with their 11th and 12th generation chipsets.
Add to that, AMD’s offerings are now solid and reliable too. Looking past these advertisements and marketing graphs, how exactly do we judge yearly improvements in performance?
We’re not sitting through hours of gameplay and counting minute frame differences or rendering 8K footage daily. That’s where benchmarking applications come in.
They make it easy to view and analyse year-over-year improvements since they present data simply and comparably. The upgrades are sometimes really significant and sometimes just slight bumps to the efficiency.
What is Geekbench?
Benchmark tools are often not comparable cross-platform. However, Geekbench scores across devices running different operating systems and kernels.
That makes Geekbench unique. You can run it on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS.
Geekbench is a popular cross-platform benchmarking tool that primarily tests the CPU. It attempts to recreate real-life workloads to issue the scores. The tool divides scores into single and multi-core scores.
There’s a lot of debate regarding the usefulness and reliability of Geekbench scores. With Geekbench 4, we saw Geekbench change the system to focus on sub-scores, which also use a new scale.
Moving Geekbench 4 to 5, we saw new algorithms and heavier workloads, with better machine learning and augmented reality tests.
We saw updates to the GPU compute tests and also support for Vulkan. Multi-threading was introduced too. Also, Geekbench 5 didn’t support 32-bit devices anymore.
Now, we have Geekbench 6, and the rest of this article will give you an idea about what Geekbench 6 is and how reliable it is when comparing two devices.
Geekbench 5 vs Geekbench 6 scores
On our iPhone 13 unit, the scores with Geekbench 5 were 1600 and 4500 on average for the single and multi-core tests, respectively. After the Geekbench 6 update, the scores jumped to over 2200 for single-core and around 5200 for multi-core.
That’s a massive improvement in scores. Another device, the M1 MacBook Air, had 1700 single-core and an average of 7000 multi-core scores earlier. Now, the device scores over 2000 on the single-core test and breaks 8100 on the multi-core test.
The latest Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra scores over 2000 on the single-core test and nearly hits the 5500 mark in multi-core. For comparison, the phone’s scores were 1300-1500 on the single-core and 4700 on the multi-core test on Geekbench 5.
That’s a massive improvement in scores. Another device, the M1 MacBook Air, had 1700 single-core and an average of 7000 multi-core scores earlier. Now, the device scores over 2000 on the single-core test and breaks 8100 on the multi-core test.
The latest Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra scores over 2000 on the single-core test and nearly hits the 5500 mark in multi-core. For comparison, the phone’s scores were 1300-1500 on the single-core and 4700 on the multi-core test on Geekbench 5.
