IPhone 13 benchmarks show both modest and huge gains

The first tests of the iPhone 13 A15 Bionic appeared in the wild, showing significant growth over the iPhone 12 generation, although a lot depends on the model you choose.

At Apple’s recent iPhone 13 launch event, the company was surprisingly silent about the level of progress made with the new A15 Bionic. The company chose to compare the new chip with an undefined “leading competitor” rather than using its closest predecessor as a reference, as is usually the case.

If this change in approach has led you to suspect that the A15 Bionic is not much different from the A14 Bionic, then you are right … and wrong. Since then, the first tests have appeared, and they have shown mixed results.

First, just a day after launch, the Geekbench 5 GPU benchmark was run for the iPhone 13 Pro. The resulting Metal score of 14216 represents a whopping 55% increase over the iPhone 12 Pro.

Since then, we’ve seen several more Geekbench 5 scores emerge, this time for the non-professional iPhone 13. How MacRumors indicates that Metal’s 10608 score represents a much smaller 15% increase over the iPhone 12 and its A14 Bionic chip.

The reason for this difference is that the iPhone 13 Pro has five GPU cores, while the iPhone 13 has four. Unlike last year’s iPhone 12 lineup, this time around there is a real difference in performance between the numbered models and the Pro models.

These more recent benchmarks also include CPU benchmarks, which are pretty much the same for the entire iPhone 13 family. We’re looking at a single-core score of around 1725 and a multi-core score of around 4600.

This translates into an increase of approximately 10% and 18%, respectively, compared to the A14 Bionic counterparts.

In a nutshell, the A15 Bionic chip represents a clear but relatively modest gain over the A14 Bionic – unless you opt for the iPhone 13 Pro or iPhone 13 Pro Max, which provide a significant 55% increase in graphics output.