Geekbench 7 is available and changes everything: the results will not be comparable to Geekbench 6
Primate Labs has released Geekbench 7, the new version of the famous cross-platform benchmark for CPUs available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. The company has published the installers, the technical documentation for the workloads, and a dedicated section in the Geekbench Browser, making the first public results immediately accessible.
Before exploring all the new features of this release, it is interesting to note that, despite Primate Labs initially promising embargoed material, the direct publication of the files on its servers effectively unveiled the benchmark before the formal distribution to the media. This unusual situation contrasts with a tool that often anticipates hardware innovations through score leaks.
The most important novelty in Geekbench 7 involves the introduction of completely new workloads. The benchmark now includes Photo Editor, Game Physics, Video Encoder, Audio Encoder, and Video Decoder. The Game Physics test leverages the Jolt Physics engine, while the multimedia workloads utilize modern technologies like AV1, Opus, and the voice recognition model Whisper. The goal is to more realistically represent the tasks that CPUs confront daily, from gaming to multimedia content processing.
Several tests from Geekbench 6 have also been removed or consolidated. Object Remover, Horizon Detection, and Photo Filter have merged into the Photo Editor test. Separate tests for Object Detection and Background Blur are no longer present, while Photo Library now manages image import, thumbnail generation, and object detection via MobileNetV1 SSD.
Primate Labs has also updated numerous existing workloads in the suite. Text Processing now uses Python 3.13 instead of Python 3.9, while Asset Compression processes ASTC and BC7 textures along with Draco geometry. The File Compression test measures performance with LZ4, zlib, and Zstandard archives to provide a broader evaluation of modern CPUs' compression and decompression capabilities.
In Geekbench 7, only eight workloads contribute to the multicore score: File Compression, Photo Library, Clang, Text Processing, Asset Compression, HDR, Photo Editor, and Ray Tracer. The tests Navigation, HTML5 Browser, PDF Viewer, Structure from Motion, Game Physics, and the multimedia tests appear exclusively in the single-core section. This choice substantially changes the relative weight of different activities in the calculation of the final score.
Geekbench 7 also adopts a new baseline of 2,500 points, based on a Lenovo Legion system with AMD Ryzen 7 7700. In Geekbench 6, the reference was a Dell Precision 3460 with Intel Core i7-12700. Primate Labs clarifies that the baseline serves only as a calibration reference: it does not mean that every Ryzen 7 7700 system must achieve exactly 2,500 points. A score of 5,000 points simply represents double the measured performance compared to the reference system within Geekbench 7.
The company also emphasizes that the results of Geekbench 7 cannot be directly compared with those of Geekbench 6 due to the profound modifications in workloads and the calculation methodology.
Naturally, enthusiasts have immediately begun testing the new suite, which will likely need some refinement. Currently, several tests of Apple computers with Apple Silicon series M chips and the latest Intel Core and AMD Ryzen processors have appeared.