Geekbench 7 is here, and it could change how every Android phone and iPhone is ranked

If you were to ask an expert to comment on the performance difference between two smartphones, the chances are that they will most likely check the Geekbench scores of both devices to figure out which one is better. For those unaware, it is a cross-platform utility tool that examines the processing power of phones by simulating real-world scenarios in them. The higher the score, the better the performance you will get from the device.

In fact, we at PhoneArena also use this application in our tests. That said, a new version of this tool, Geekbench 7, has been launched, and it comes with new and better workloads to examine the performance of your phone's CPU and GPU.

What changes would you experience in the CPU tests?

The latest version of Geekbench introduces new media workloads for audio and video encoding, decoding, and processing. These tests basically mimic the daily life tasks of a normal user, like video calls, sharing the phone screen, and other types of content a user consumes on their smartphone.

Primate Labs, the company behind Geekbench, has also added a new Game Physics workload that is designed around the Jolt Physics engine. For reference, it is the same engine that is used in many well-known AAA games like Horizon Forbidden West. The photo library workload has received support for two additional formats, which include JPEG XL and DNG. The announcement post also mentions that the photo editor tests now feature more real-world edits.

Probably the most important change in the newer version is how multi-core scores are calculated. Unlike the previous version, Geekbench 7 runs an operation in multi-core mode only when that's exactly how it performs in a real app.

For instance, the HTML5 browser test would not go through the multi-core test because browsers are single-threaded, according to Primate Labs. The major advantage of this would be that you would get a result that closely reflects real-life performance instead of an inflated score.

What about GPU tests?

In the latest version, content creation and machine learning operations are reportedly the main focus of Primate Labs. This includes things like tracking faces with filters, image upscaling using machine learning, and simulating virtual background capabilities that many video conferencing apps like Google Meet offer these days.

Geekbench 7 is now capable of running a few new types of tests, which include RAW image processing, path tracing, fluid simulation, and LUT-based color grading. From the GPU aspect, the most important news about the tool is that it is now compatible with CUDA, which basically allows Nvidia GPUs to perform general purpose computing. CUDA joins the already available APIs like OpenCL, Vulkan, and Metal.

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