Geekbench 7 will push your computer or phone even harder for better benchmarking

It looks and acts like Geekbench 6, but under the hood are larger datasets, new audio / video tests, and more tweaks.

Primate Labs is releasing Geekbench 7 , the latest generation of its popular benchmarking tool. Geekbench 7 features new video and audio encoding / decoding tests, a redesigned multi-core test, and larger, more demanding datasets for CPUs and GPUs to crunch through. It otherwise looks and acts just like Geekbench 6, and a Pro license will cost the same $99 (discounted to $79 until August 6th).

A Geekbench 7 Pro license allows for offline benchmarking that doesn’t get uploaded to the Geekbench Browser , and it still covers all compatible desktop platforms of Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Geekbench is one of the mainstay synthetic benchmarks we use in reviewing laptops here at The Verge . I’ve always liked how simple and fast Geekbench is to run, but its short duration also means it’s a better test of quick bursts of computing rather than sustained loads that can throttle some CPUs and GPUs. (One of its tests involves rendering a 1.5MB PDF file, which must be near-instantaneous for most modern chips.)

Primate Labs claims Geekbench 7 uses “more demanding data sets to more accurately capture the hardware demands of modern applications.” The new audio / video tests also now include AV1, Opus, model video conferencing, streaming, and content consumption workloads. And multi-core benchmarks are designed to better reflect real software behavior since the new workloads will only run multi-threaded when the modeled tasks run that way.

These all sound like marked improvements, even if Geekbench 7 tests still only take a few minutes to run. Scores from Geekbench 6 are of course not compatible with Geekbench 7. So if you’re the testing type, feel free to spiritually join me in a whole bunch of new benchmark testing and retesting. Always be testing.