Early iPhone 13 benchmarks confirm all are fast, but the Pro models are monsters

Iphone 13 A15 Facts (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

Early benchmarks have shown that the new iPhone 13 lineup is full of fast phones.
Tests show that the iPhone 13 Pro's extra GPU core ensures it handily beats out the iPhone 13 in some tests.

After announcing iPhone 13 earlier this week, Apple said that devices will be on sale next Friday, September 24. We don't need to wait that long to see just how speedy that new A15 Bionic chip is, though — early benchmarks are already appearing online. And as expected, these new handsets are fast.

According to a handful of Geekbench GPU tests that have already appeared online, the iPhone 13 Pro appears to be around 55% faster than the outgoing iPhone 12 Pro. Similarly, iPhone 13 is around 15% faster than the iPhone 12.

While both iPhones are faster than their older counterparts, the gulf between iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 is obvious. With Geekbench Metal scores of 14216 and 10608 respectively, it seems the former's extra GPU core is hard at work. As a reminder, iPhone 13 has a four-core GPU, while the GPU inside iPhone 13 Pro has five cores.

Iphone 13 Pro Colors (Image credit: Apple)

As numbers first spied by MacRumors show, the gap is smaller in terms of raw CPU performance. In fact, the identical CPU cores used by both iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro ensure almost identical scores — around 1730 each.

All of this again goes to show that iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max, will be the best iPhones for anyone looking to game or run graphics-intensive apps on their devices.

The new round of iPhones goes up for pre-order tomorrow, with devices available in-store next week. Do these benchmarks change your buying plans at all?

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.

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