iPhone 13 benchmarks — Apple just blew away Android phones

iPhone 13 Pro Max review
(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

All four of our iPhone 13 reviews are in, as are our benchmark results from testing. Apple promised gains with the new A15 Bionic chip, and while it's an iterative upgrade over last year's A14 Bionic in most respects, it crushes the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 that powers several of the best Android phones.

From synthetic benchmarks to real-world testing, the iPhone 13 series (especially the Pro models) pulled even further ahead from the best chips Apple's competitors use. In some cases, the gap is incredibly wide. Qualcomm has its work cut out for it with the next-generation 800-series Snapdragon, not to mention the Tensor chip Google is working on to power the Pixel 6.

Apple even said that the A15 Bionic's GPU in the Pro models would be 50% faster than the competition. (The best rival graphics engine right now is the Adreno 660 in the Snapdragon 888.) In our testing, that proved true in many cases. The A15's performance hike over iPhone 12 phones is middling, but Apple upgraded the Neural Engine on its chipset this year. This has allowed for the new Cinematic mode and Photographic Styles, which heavily leverage AI to do their thing.

Measuring a phone's performance goes beyond raw numbers. It's more about what the phone can do in a real-world setting, and in that regard, the iPhone 13 certainly delivers. But those raw numbers do tell an important story, so here's how the iPhone 13 stacks up to what's already out there, for both the Pro, standard and mini models.

iPhone 13: Geekbench results

Geekbench 5 measures the CPU's overall performance, broken out into single- and multi-core results.

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Geekbench 5
Row 0 - Cell 0 ProcessorSingle coreMulticore
iPhone 13 ProA15 Bionic17334718
iPhone 13A15 Bionic16884436
iPhone 12 ProA14 Bionic15953880
iPhone 12A14 Bionic15933859
Galaxy S21 UltraSnapdragon 88811233440
Galaxy S21Snapdragon 88810483302
Galaxy Z Fold 3Snapdragon 88811073418
OnePlus 9 ProSnapdragon 88811263685
Asus ROG Phone 5Snapdragon 88811273672
Pixel 5Snapdragon 765G5961617

Geekbench 5 scores are arbitrary in a vacuum, but they help measure a device's performance in context to other devices — even if you get slightly different scores every time you run the test.

As you can see, the iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini models are quite a ways ahead of the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 765G. More than a thousand points separates the iPhone 13 Pro from the two most powerful Android phones we've ever tested, the OnePlus 9 Pro and Asus ROG Phone 5. That's not to mention that the new iPhones pull well ahead of the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21 Ultra and Galaxy Z Fold 3, the best that Samsung has to offer.

And we'll just skip over that delta between the iPhone 13 and the Pixel 5. Let's hope the Pixel 6 helps Google catch up a bit.

iPhone 13: Graphics benchmarks

A lot of people play games on their phones, with the iPhones leading the charge. For the following benchmark, we use 3DMark's Wild Life Unlimited test, which produces a score and average frames per second. It's meant to provide a realistic impression of a phone's gaming performance.

The A15 Bionic pushes the boundaries on mobile gaming, as you'll see in the results below.

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3DMark Wild Life Unlimited
Row 0 - Cell 0 ProcessorScoreFrames per second
iPhone 13 ProA15 Bionic11,69370
iPhone 13A15 Bionic933156
iPhone 12 ProA14 Bionic861951
iPhone 12A14 Bionic855551
Galaxy S21 UltraSnapdragon 888573934
Galaxy S21Snapdragon 888580535
Galaxy Z Fold 3Snapdragon 888562234
OnePlus 9 ProSnapdragon 888575535
Asus ROG Phone 5Snapdragon 888580635
Pixel 5Snapdragon 765G11607

Like Geekbench, the Wild Life Unlimited score is meaningless on its own and should only be used for comparison to other devices. However, the important metric is the average FPS, which is a real-world benchmark. 

The iPhone 13 Pro with its five-core GPU smokes the competition, even its iPhone 13 sibling and that phone's quad-core GPU — the extra core seems to really matter, based on these results. But look at how far ahead the A15 Bionic is compared to the Snapdragon 888 phones, which hadn't caught up to the A14 Bionic from last year. 

The iPhone 13 Pro netted double the Snapdragon 888's best framerate in our testing, which is insane. The Wild Life Unlimited benchmark is pretty hard on phones. (I didn't even include the newer Wild Life Extreme Unlimited, which we've only recently started using in our testing.) So seeing the iPhone 13 Pro fare so well is a bit mind-boggling.

iPhone 13: Video encoding speeds

Another real-world application to gauge a phone's performance is our Adobe Premiere Rush test. This tasks a phone to transcode a 4K video file to 1080p. The results below are listed as minutes:seconds.

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Adobe Premiere Rush
Row 0 - Cell 0 ProcessorTime (Mins:Secs)
iPhone 13 ProA15 Bionic0:26
iPhone 13A15 Bionic0:26
iPhone 12 ProA14 Bionic0:27
iPhone 12A14 Bionic0:26
Galaxy S21 UltraSnapdragon 8881:03
Galaxy S21Snapdragon 8881:03
Galaxy Z Fold 3Snapdragon 8880:50
OnePlus 9 ProSnapdragon 8881:03
Asus ROG Phone 5Snapdragon 8881:00
Pixel 5Snapdragon 765G2:52

Year-over-year, there's functionally no difference between the iPhone 13 and iPhone 12 — maybe a second here or there. However, Apple's lead over Qualcomm remains, performing the transcode in half the time that most of the Snapdragon 888-equipped phones needed.

Transcoding is a CPU-intensive task, and it makes sense that Apple's phones would lead the way on this particular benchmark. Apple has said that you can perform a full video workflow from shooting to rendering on the iPhone 13. The iPhone 13 can also record in the ProRes format natively, which is what many professionals use.

The poor Pixel 5 needed triple the time required by the other Android phones.

iPhone 13 performance outlook

Another year, and Apple has further cemented its lead over Qualcomm. Not only does the iPhone 13 series have excellent battery life (excluding the mini, which is below average) and stellar cameras, but it's the most powerful suite of phones you can buy. If having the best performance is a top priority for you, then you'll want to look at the iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro/Pro Max. The phones went on sale on September 24.

Let's hope Qualcomm's next high-end Snapdragon or Google's Tensor can narrow the gap with what Apple has built.

Jordan Palmer
Phones Editor

Jordan is the Phones Editor for Tom's Guide, covering all things phone-related. He's written about phones for over six years and plans to continue for a long while to come. He loves nothing more than relaxing in his home with a book, game, or his latest personal writing project. Jordan likes finding new things to dive into, from books and games to new mechanical keyboard switches and fun keycap sets. Outside of work, you can find him poring over open-source software and his studies.

  • JazzyUK
    admin said:
    Our results from benchmarking the new iPhone 13 models are in and they're a doozy. Apple's A15 Bionic chipset has pulled even further ahead of the best that Android has to offer once again.

    iPhone 13 benchmarks — Apple just blew away Android phones : Read more

    It is amazing how the iPhone 13 Pro has all this horsepower but cannot do any of the multitasking of the Samsung Galaxy Note and Z Fold series.

    I upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 and can confirm this is the best phone ever - imo - as it does everything I expect from a power phone - split-screen multitasking, tablet mode, compatible with my Surface Book 3, highly customizable and open ecosystem.
    Reply
  • TidalWaveOne
    All this power and still no always-on display. I wonder if the speech recognition has caught up to Google. Doubt it though.
    Reply
  • H1a82001
    Here's the kicker. My galaxy s21 runs circles around my iphone 12 pro max in everyday real world use. It's faster and more smoother. Mobile benchmarks are only for video editing and chess engine speed, nothing more.
    Reply