Geekbench 6 has tougher benchmarks to keep up with new tech

Primate Labs has announced Geekbench 6, an updated version of its popular cross-platform benchmarking app.

In line with the increasing power of modern phones and computers, the company has updated the tests it uses in the benchmark to put more stress on these devices’ chipsets.

This includes processing larger photo file sizes, larger maps for navigation tests, and bigger PDF samples, plus new tests such as video call background blur, photo filters, and AI object detection.

Here at Tech Advisor, we’ve been using Geekbench apps for many years to put a literal number on the processing power of every smartphone that we review.

We’ve recently reviewed some phones equipped with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, such as the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and the OnePlus 11. Soon we’ll publish our verdict on the Vivo X90 Pro with its MediaTek Dimensity 9200.

We run Geekbench on all these phones, but the familiar multi-core score that we talk about in every phone review is derived differently in version 6.

“Rather than adding together the performance of each core so that benchmarks scale linearly with an increased core count, our tests measure how cores actually share workloads in true-to-life workload examples,” the company said in a press release.

To see the difference, we ran both Geekbench 5 and 6 on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. In version 5, it scored 4996 for multi-core, but that became 5118 in version 6.

It’s important to compare only like with like, so you can’t take a Geekbench 5 score and compare it to one from Geekbench 6.

It’s hoped that the new tests better reflect the sorts of tasks people regularly do on their phones, tablets, and computers to better represent the true power of an individual device.

Since September 2019 we’ve been using Geekbench 5 CPU benchmark to record the (usually) four-digit score for each device that we then cross reference with devices with similar specs or price to see which is technically most powerful.

Synthetic benchmarks don’t tell the whole picture of a phone’s processing power, but they are certainly a good guide. And hey, it’s fun if you’re as nerdy as we are here at Tech Advisor.

Geekbench 6 is free to download from today for personal use for Android and iOS though you have to pay for the Mac, Windows, and Linux versions.

There’s also a Pro version available with more features which, at launch, is on sale at $79 – 20% off its usual price of $99.

We can’t wait to see how the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phones of the future score on the new app.