Raspberry Pi 4 vs Raspberry Pi 3: CPU and GPU Benchmarks (Updated with TinkerBoard CPU test)

 
Here is a quick test of performances of the new Raspberry Pi 4 versus previous Raspberry Pi 3.

Both Raspberry Pi boards run the latest Raspbian Buster:

$ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.19.66-v7l+ #1253 SMP Thu Aug 15 12:02:08 BST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux

 

1 – CPU Benchmark

To benchmark the CPU, I used Sysbench, a cross-platform and multi-threaded benchmark tool. The installation of Sysbench on Raspbian is easy:

$ sudo apt-get install sysbench

If you encounter some problem to install sysbench, try to update your raspbian with sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.

Now that Sysbench is installed, we can launch the multi-threaded (4 threads) CPU test with:

$ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --num-threads=4 run

 
The output of sysbench on the Raspberry Pi 4:

sysbench 0.4.12:  multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark

Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 4

Doing CPU performance benchmark

Threads started!
Done.

Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 20000


Test execution summary:
    total time:                          62.8169s
    total number of events:              10000
    total time taken by event execution: 251.2240
    per-request statistics:
         min:                                 24.94ms
         avg:                                 25.12ms
         max:                                 68.14ms
         approx.  95 percentile:              25.10ms

Threads fairness:
    events (avg/stddev):           2500.0000/4.24
    execution time (avg/stddev):   62.8060/0.01

Results:

CPU score – lower is better

62 sec – Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian Buster)

64 sec – ASUS TinkerBoard (TinkerOS 2.0.11)

96 sec – Raspberry Pi 3 (Raspbian Buster)

The Raspberry Pi 4 shows a performance boost of +36% compared to the Raspberry Pi 3.

Update (2019.10.01)
The new RPi 4 is slightly faster than ASUS’ TinkerBoard. Looks like the TinkerBoard was the target of the RPi 4!

In 2016, I tested the RPi 3 vs RPi 2. And at that moment, with the 2016 version of Raspbian, the RPi 3 had a score of 120 sec in sysbench. Since the version of sysbench is the same (sysbench 0.4.12), nice improvements have been done in Raspbian since three years.

 

2 – GPU Benchmark

For the GPU benchmark, I used the latest GeeXLab 0.29.2.

The Raspberry Pi 4 comes with a new GPU, the VideoCore VI (Raspberry Pi 3 and previous boards have the VideoCore IV).

The GL_RENDERER string for the VideoCore 6 (RPi 4) is:

GL_RENDERER: V3D 4.2

The GL_RENDERER string for the VideoCore 4 (RPi 3) is:

GL_RENDERER: VC4 V3D 2.1

 

2.1 – GeeXLab

This first test is simple: I launched GeeXLab (default resolution: 800×400) and wrote down the framerate.

GeeXLab 0.29.2 on the RPi 4:

 
GeeXLab 0.29.2 on the RPi 3:

 
GPU score – higher is better

188 FPS – Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian Buster)

140 FPS – Raspberry Pi 3 (Raspbian Buster)

In this test, the Raspberry Pi 4 is +34% faster than the Raspberry Pi 3.

 

2.2 – GeeXLab + Shadertoy

This second test is focused on the GPU power and what’s better than a shadertoy test to evaluate the raw power of a GPU.

Shadertoy tests are available with GeeXLab in the demopack02/shadertoy/ folder. Launch GeeXLab and drag and drop one of the XML files.

The first shadertoy test is 09-noise-animation-electric.xml (resolution: 600×380):

 
GPU score – higher is better

138 FPS – Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian Buster) – OpenGL 2.1

90 FPS – Raspberry Pi 3 (Raspbian Buster) – OpenGL 2.1

In this test, the Raspberry Pi 4 is +53% faster than the Raspberry Pi 3.

 
The second test is 43-smiley-tutorial.xml (resolution: 800×480):

 
GPU score – higher is better

85 FPS – Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian Buster)

50 FPS – Raspberry Pi 3 (Raspbian Buster)

In this test, the Raspberry Pi 4 is +70% faster than the Raspberry Pi 3.

 
The third and last test is 21-radial_blur.xml (resolution: 800×600):

 
GPU score – higher is better

25 FPS – Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian Buster)

4 FPS – Raspberry Pi 3 (Raspbian Buster)

In this test, the Raspberry Pi 4 is… +525% faster than the Raspberry Pi 3!

This test is very heavy and the Raspberry Pi 3 has some difficulties to handle it properly (the desktop becomes unusable). But the Raspberry Pi 4 handles it without problems. The VideoCore 6 is a nice GPU. I hope we’ll see in, a near future, the support of OpenGL 3.2, or even OpenGL 4.2 added to Raspbian. And why not Vulkan? Because I quickly saw some Vulkan .so files in the latest version of Raspbian Buster…