Announcing updates to our benchmark suite (and why they’re still useful)

If you've looked at some of our reviews in the last couple days, you may have noticed a few different benchmarks and some new charts that we weren't using before. We don't usually do this, but behind the scenes we've just given our benchmark suite a comprehensive update for the first time since 2013. In the interest of keeping you guys informed and letting you know what we're thinking here on the Ars Orbiting HQ, this is a good opportunity to run through the tests we do, why we do them, and why we care about benchmarks in the first place.

Charts

These colors may look a little wonky compared to our old ones, but they're more legible to people with different types of colorblindness.

First, you'll notice that we're using some new colors in our charts. As much as we liked the bright colors in our previous charts—colors chosen to match the Ars color palette, incidentally—we got semi-regular feedback from colorblind folks that they were hard to read. Ars Creative Director Aurich Lawson chose our new chart colors to be easily legible by people with all common forms of colorblindness.

What we're using: CPU and GPU compute benchmarks

Geekbench 4 is our primary benchmark for CPU performance and GPU compute performance. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

We may use benchmarks other than these when we're doing in-depth component reviews of the latest flagship processors or graphics cards, but generally speaking in phone and laptop reviews these are the standard benchmarks we'll be running on everything.

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