Geekbench 7(geekbench.com) |
Geekbench 7(geekbench.com) |
Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.
Some good benchmark options here https://hwbot.org/benchmarks
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-i...
Why are they incomparable? If I want to run a highly parallel task surely this tells me which one to use?
> Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.
Pretty sure the internal tests it uses are similar to these
For instance, on version 6:
.. but it chugs power like it's not even funny.
I do like synthetic benchmarks as one input signal when evaluating a CPU; otherwise we go back to stupid numbers like frequency... which also never made sense because they had 1.8GHz AMD Athlon CPUs outperforming 2.4GHz Pentium 4's in 2002-3...
Doing a lot of real-world application testing is good, but there's always some you miss, and the worst part about it is that people start to lose patience when assessing.. How is a cinebench comparing to doing gamedev in UE5?
How is doing gamedev in UE5 comparing to doing gamedev in Snowdrop?
How does doing gamedev in Snowdrop compare to doing virtualisation (different CPUs handling that particular task better than others).
there's so many dimensions that it will always be true that there's not enough testing.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have rigorous testing like you say, in fact, what I'm actually saying is that "single number→would you like to go deeper" is a better pipeline than an excel spreadsheet that goes on for 10 pages (which still skips a bunch of nuance) and still better than one that goes on for 500 pages with a broad spectrum of topics.
The reason I'm so bitter about this is because outlets like LTT and Gamers Nexus seem to choose their games randomly (based on popularity I guess?) and so all the titles I worked on kinda got smeared by my "company"- but our games used hugely different game engines that work differently (Dunia vs Snowdrop handle CPUs... VERY differently. Snowdrop is built for multi-core. Anvil works best on a single core, and Dunia has trouble going passed 4 cores- so on large systems with multiple NUMA zones the performance is.. worse.
So the "battery of tests" always gave us a shitty score and reviewers just moved on believing themselves to be comprehensive arbiters of truth regarding performance and giving verdicts regarding the performance of games as a broad topic, without regard to the utility of it (500+ fps on CSGO isn't even renderable for example).
People might have been better served by looking broadly at how powerful the CPUs actually are and then digging in, because then also: developers will actually make software that tries to use the features on offer instead of assuming people will just buy CPUs that work better on their workloads.
It's a kind of "to big to fail" mentality where incumbents start being able to direct CPU sales based on those CPUs being optimised for their workloads. It's self-reinforcing.
If you ever want a cheeky laugh ask your llm of choice to write a satirical Userbenchmark amd review.
Geekbench 5 is famously much better than Geekbench 6 for benchmarking these workstation-class CPUs (though many other benchmarks are better still, especially if you can grab the source code and compile them yourself).
I still like having a set of benchmarks that run across Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and on Arm, X86, RISC-V, etc... even if imperfect, it's a point of reference to get a general feel. And the single core scores are a great representation of a 'feel' against baseline in day-to-day use.
The Geekbench 5 approach of pretending Amdahl's Law doesn't exist is sometimes a valid benchmarking strategy, but generally is the wrong choice for benchmarking consumer workloads and devices, and that's what Geekbench is ostensibly targeting.
The fact that Geekbench 6 scores don't increase linearly with the addition of more CPU cores is not a weakness of the benchmark, it's the benchmark demonstrating an important real-world effect.
The change that Geekbench 7 makes to exclude some subtests from the multicore suite entirely will definitely have the effect of making the overall multicore score scale better with the addition of more cores, but most of the audience for those scores is going to miss out on the fact that the multicore test now measures a narrower range of tasks than the single-core test suite.
> In Geekbench 7, a workload only runs in multi-threaded mode if the task it models actually runs multi-threaded in real applications. For example, the HTML5 Browser test isn’t included in the multi-threaded suite because web browsers are single-threaded (or lightly threaded).
But, of all of the 2-pick-only options, choosing a custom mix and calling it multi-core requires guessing your actual workload on both the content of the mixed test suite as well as the scaling profile of the CPU to reason with. On the other hand, just testing "single core" and "all core" at least only requires you to guess based on what you think the scaling profile of the CPU is.
Nothing beats just testing your actual workload, but that doesn't mean all other ways of testing have to be equally good.
(One could just as easily argue that the single-core test suit ought to exclude any task typically done with multiple threads in real-world usage.)
Yes, that's pretty much the whole point of Geekbench: to offer non-experts a way to measure CPU performance and produce scores that are relevant to a specific class of devices and users and use cases, rather than artificially inflated.
Benchmarking experts can already use something like SPEC, which does offer single-thread and both types of multi-thread test modes (SPECrate and SPECspeed).