With
iOS 7 now officially out, we
had hordes of iPhone users report their experience with the new OS
through pretty much every possible medium. The first revamp of the
simplistic OS has definitely rejuvenated iPhone owners' interest in
their devices, and that's no surprise – the changes are
significant. But, a common question we've seen being asked is whether
the new iteration made things better or worse, at least as far as
performance
is concerned.
Thankfully, we were prepared for
this, and we ran a few benchmarks on an iPhone 5 before and after we
updated from iOS 6 to iOS 7. And while we've been hearing that the now
older iPhones, like the iPhone 4, are struggling with the load of the
new OS (not that they were handling iOS 6 all that handsomely in the
first place), the situation with our own iPhone 5 was actually kind of
uneventful. Across the board, tests provided largely the close to or the
same scores, as you're about to see. In fact, the differences were so
small
that it felt like the two OSes are largely identical in terms of
performance.
Browsermark 2.0
Browsermark is
one of our favorite benchmarking tools as far as web browsing goes,
because it tries to replicate what you'll usually do once you fire up
Safari, providing some pretty relevant feedback as far as real life
usages goes. As we hinted above, the differences between the
performance under iOS 6 and iOS 7 are close to non-existent here. The scores were averaged over three separate runs.
iOS 6 (iPhone
5): 2800
iOS 7 (iPhone
5): 2784
SunSpider
0.9.1
Another
browser benchmark, we once again tested the iPhone running iOS
6 and iOS 7 three times respectively, and then extrapolated the
average. Once again, the differences in performance were negligible.
iOS 6 (iPhone
5): 731.9
iOS 7 (iPhone
5): 727.5
GLBenchmark 2.7
The
GPU-intensive GLBenchmark 2.7 should give you a better clue as to
what to expect once you turn on the more graphics-intensive
applications out there, like games. The short answer is that you
shouldn't be any more concerned than you were before the switch.
T-Rex HD
(onscreen):
iOS 6 (iPhone
5): 14 fps
iOS 7 (iPhone
5): 13 fps
Egypt HD
(onscreen):
iOS 6 (iPhone
5): 41 fps
iOS 7 (iPhone
5): 37 fps
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