Primate Labs has released the Geekbench 7 benchmark, a new version of its cross-platform performance test for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux. The company says this release changes how Geekbench measures CPUs and GPUs, with new workloads for media, gaming physics, machine learning and content creation.
The basic version remains free for personal use. Primate Labs is also selling Geekbench 7 Pro, with a 20% discount available until August 6, according to the company.
What changed in Geekbench 7?
The most consequential change is in the multi-core CPU test. Primate Labs says Geekbench 7 no longer pushes every workload across every available CPU core by default. Instead, a task runs as a multi-threaded benchmark only when the real application being modeled would use multiple threads.
That sounds like a small methodological tweak, but it matters. A benchmark that forces all cores to work can reward chips in ways a normal app would not. Primate Labs gives the HTML5 browser test as an example: it has been removed from the multi-core suite because browsers are usually single-threaded or lightly threaded for that kind of work.
The company says the goal is a score that better matches general system performance, rather than a score dominated by workloads that scale neatly across a large CPU. As with any benchmark revision, that also means Geekbench 7 results should not be treated as directly interchangeable with older Geekbench scores.
New media and gaming CPU workloads
Geekbench 7 adds several media tests aimed at common consumer and creator tasks. Primate Labs says the suite now includes AV1 video encoding for screen sharing in video calls, Opus audio compression for use cases such as voice recording and podcasts, and simultaneous media decoding with live caption generation using OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model.
The release also adds a Game Physics workload based on the Jolt Physics engine, which Primate Labs says is used in modern games. That test is meant to measure CPU performance in physics-heavy gaming scenarios, where object simulation can put a different kind of pressure on a processor than video encoding or document handling.
Existing image-related CPU tests are being expanded too. The Photo Editor workload now uses more complex editing operations, while the Photo Library test adds support for newer image formats including JPEG XL and DNG.
How does Geekbench 7 test GPUs?
Primate Labs says the GPU benchmark in Geekbench 7 has been reworked to cover more than games. The new suite includes machine-learning and content-creation style tasks such as real-time face tracking, social media filter effects, AI image upscaling and background blur for video calls.
Other GPU workloads include RAW image processing, LUT-based video color grading, path tracing and fluid simulation. Geekbench 7 also adds support for Nvidia's CUDA API alongside OpenCL, Vulkan and Metal, which lets users test Nvidia GPUs through an API commonly used in professional and AI software.
The benchmark datasets have been refreshed as well. Primate Labs says the File Compression test now uses a wider mix of archives containing source code, object code and text documents. The PDF Viewer workload covers more file types, including park maps, technical documentation and academic papers. Developer and image processing tests also receive more assets and additional image formats.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
