When hardware manufacturers introduce a new generation of devices, they usually advertise speed increases – up to 50 percent faster, graphics twice as fast, etc. Many users ask themselves how much of this acceleration will be reflected in their usage scenarios. Geekbench helps to find out the answer: The software runs a variety of automated tests and measures how long it takes the computer to complete them. The result (in addition to a detailed result) is a numerical test value (score) that can be used to make easy comparisons. Primate Labs has now introduced the seventh version of the Geekbench test suite, which has been particularly optimized for media editing and multi-core tasks. The test suite is made up of individual steps that are used by many users. For example, a screen video is compressed with the AV1 codec, which is used when sharing the screen content in video conferences. In addition, voice content is converted into text using the “Whisper” transcription engine to simulate playing video with automatically generated subtitles.
Optimized multi-threaded tasks
According to the manufacturer’s announcement, the division of single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks is now more realistic: tasks such as HTML5 rendering, which are hardly multithreaded-capable, now only take place in the single-threaded benchmark. GPU testing uses facial tracking, real-time filtering, and adding blur to background objects. In addition to OpenCL, Vulkan and Metal, CUDA is also available as a GPU API (on Nvidia graphics cards) for the first time.
Previous scores not comparable
Geekbench carries out CPU and GPU tests and provides numerical values that can be used to compare different hardware configurations. However, this only applies to numerical values of one generation. Due to changed test constellations and evaluations, the results of Geekbench 7 cannot be equated with those of Geekbench 6. For example, on the same hardware, the new version calculates a lower single-thread and a higher multi-thread score.
Geekbench scores: version 6 vs. 7
| test | Geekbench 6 | Geekbench 7 |
| Single core | 3965 | 3498 |
| Multi-core | 20894 | 22508 |
| OpenCL | 60349 | 61086 |
| Metal | 99476 | 101789 |
Hardware: MacBook Pro with M4 Pro
Universal Mac version
Geekbench 7 is available to download free of charge for macOS, iOS, Windows, Linux and Android. The free version automatically adds generated metrics to the developer’s metrics collection. The Pro model includes automation and command line tools and is 20 percent off to $79 through August 6th. The Mac version, which is a good 500 MB in size when downloaded, requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) and runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. For a holistic view, it is worth using additional benchmarks such as 3DMark, Cinebench and Blender Benchmark.
