I’m excited to announce that Geekbench 4.2, the latest version of our popular cross-platform benchmark, is now available for download. Geekbench 4.2 re-introduces the Battery Benchmark and includes several fixes to the Metal Compute Benchmark.
Battery Benchmark
Geekbench 4.2 re-introduces the Battery Benchmark on Android and iOS. The Battery Benchmark is designed to measure the battery life of a device when running processor-intensive applications such as games.
The Battery Benchmark operates in one of two modes. The Partial Discharge mode runs a (relatively) short test over three hours and provides an estimate of battery performance. The Full Discharge mode runs a complete discharge and provides the most accurate assessment of battery performance but can take up to twenty hours to complete and requires a fully-charged battery to run.
The Battery Benchmark provides a battery score which represents how much work the device can complete on a single battery charge. Like all Geekbench scores, higher scores are better, with double the score representing double the work.
Metal Compute Benchmark
Geekbench 4.2 includes several fixes that resolve issues with the Metal Compute Benchmark on discrete GPUs. Metal scores will be significantly higher on systems with discrete GPUs such as the AMD Radeon RX 580, and Metal results are now competitive with OpenCL and CUDA results. Metal scores will be the same on systems with integrated GPUs.
The underlying issue was that data transfers to and from the GPU could occur during the Metal benchmarks (these transfers do not happen during the OpenCL or CUDA benchmarks). The transfers caused the Metal benchmarks to appear slower since extra work was happening during the benchmark.
This issue only affected discrete GPUs since the transfers occurred over the PCIe bus which is significantly slower than the system memory used by integrated GPUs.
Availability
Geekbench 4.2 is available today for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux. Geekbench 4.2 is a free update for all Geekbench 4 users.