jfpoole

That error message means Geekbench cannot connect to the Geekbench Browser to upload your benchmark result. Can you access the Geekbench Browser using your web browser?

I worry about runtime checks that make decisions about how to run the benchmark. Geekbench 3 and Geekbench 4 include runtime checks that modify the benchmark to accommodate older, less-capable hardware. These checks are what folks are using to "tweak" their Geekbench scores. My preference would be to have a "one size fits all" benchmark that works the same regardless of the underlying hardware. It may limit the range of hardware it supports, but I think it's the best, most robust approach to having a sane benchmark that is resistant to hacks.

Over the past few months we've been toying around with the idea of creating a separate memory benchmark. Our initial thought would be to use the Geekbench 3 and 4 memory tests as a starting point. The memory test work and are well-liked, and moving them into a separate benchmark would give us the opportunity to fix the outstanding issues with them (especially on modern hardware). If we were to create something that focused on testing memory performance, what would people want to see? What is your wishlist for a memory benchmark?

I outlined my initial concerns with Benchmate earlier in this thread, and since then we've discovered that Benchmate can cause Geekbench to report unrealistically high scores for some workloads.

We're not interested in having Geekbench integrated in Benchmate. Seeing that you're re-introducing support is confusing. I would urge you to reconsider this decision.

We've integrated the fixes introduced in Geekbench 3.4.3 into Geekbench 4 and Geekbench 5. Geekbench 4.4.4 and Geekbench 5.2.4 fix the issues that prevented both from being used on AMD systems running Windows 10 on HWBOT. Both releases are available for download from the Geekbench website: http://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-4.4.4-WindowsSetup.exe http://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-5.2.4-WindowsSetup.exe Let me know if you hit any issues with either release.

@Sparky's__Adventure Geekbench 3.4.4 is the latest version of Geekbench 3, and includes all of the fixes included in 3.4.3b3: http://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-3.4.4-WindowsSetup.exe

This is fascinating. Thanks, @Splave, for taking the time to write this up. A couple of things that might be helpful: You can still download Geekbench 3.1.5 from our servers if you'd prefer an official link: https://geekbench.s3.amazonaws.com/Geekbench-3.1.5-WindowsSetup.exe Geekbench 3.4.3 is out of beta and is now the default download on the Geekbench 3 website: https://www.geekbench.com/geekbench3/download/

This is true of any application (even Benchmate) provided someone is willing to devote enough time to the endeavour. I'm just glad we were able to fix the big issues that were of concern to the HWBot folks. Thanks for your help!

@_mat_ I'm glad you were able to verify that Geekbench is now resilient against both BCLK skews and Win32 API hooks. It's less important how Geekbench implements these protections and more important whether these protections work. If you don't have the resources to test the edge cases we can certainly look into including them in our regular test plan for Geekbench. I would just need to know how to reproduce these edge cases so our QA team can reproduce them in our lab.

@_mat_ I’m assuming this means you weren’t able to reproduce the issues you encountered on Beta 1 with Beta 3?

Geekbench 3.4.3 Beta 3 is now available for download: https://geekbench.s3.amazonaws.com/Geekbench-3.4.3b3-WindowsSetup.exe Beta 3 includes the following changes: Update how valid and invalid results are displayed to the user. Update the Browser to display the validation status of Geekbench 3 results. Fix benchmark initialization issues on HEDT systems. Beta 3 should run much more quickly on HEDT systems than Beta 2. Fix memory frequency detection. Give it a try and let me know if you hit any issues. If no other issues are encountered we'll most likely make this an official release in early March, and then start work on migrating the validation code into Geekbench 4 and Geekbench 5.

@Splave, it may take a while for the benchmark to initialize on TR3 systems (it's proportional to the number of hardware threads). How long did you let Geekbench sit at the "Benchmark Progress" dialog?

Geekbench 3.4.3 Beta 2 is now available for download: https://geekbench.s3.amazonaws.com/Geekbench-3.4.3b2-WindowsSetup.exe Beta 2 improves the in-app validation routines, and makes it far more obvious whether Geekbench considers a result valid (or invalid or questionable) due to timer issues. Beta 2 will still let users view invalid results as well as upload them to the Geekbench Browser. The Browser still needs to be updated to display the validation status of the results, but that should be straightforward once the client code is working properly. Give it a try and let me know if you hit any issues.

For what it's worth we still sell and support Geekbench 3. For the vast majority of users we recommend Geekbench 5 as it has much more modern benchmark tests, but if people hit bugs with Geekbench 3 we'd like to hear about it.

How did you run Geekbench? On our test systems that drastic a change to BCLK would’ve been flagged.

I disagree -- I think this is something we should fix in Geekbench itself, as then these fixes benefit all Geekbench users. I don't know the full list of processors, but the 3990X (along with the W-3175X) was mentioned explicitly by @Splave.

We're working on a new Geekbench 3 release that addresses issues that affect the overclocking community. The first preview release, Geekbench 3.4.3 Beta 1, is now available for download: https://geekbench.s3.amazonaws.com/Geekbench-3.4.3b1-WindowsSetup.exe Geekbench 3.4.3 Beta 1 fixes the issues that prevented Geekbench 3 from working on recent AMD and Intel HEDT processors. Geekbench 3.4.3 Beta 1 also fixes several issues that prevented Geekbench 3 from being used on AMD systems running Windows 10 on HWBOT. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Geekbench 3, 4, and 5 only use CPUIDSDK to report system information. Swapping out the DLLs should have no impact on the benchmark score. I'll take a look and see if we can't do a release of Geekbench 3 that includes the latest CPUIDSDK DLLs.

Which DLLs did you have to replace? The CPUIDSDK DLLs?

@Mythical tech I am being paranoid here but at the same time we've had legal threats for weirder things in the past so maybe the paranoia is justified! @_mat_ FWIW removing the profiling code (which wasn't controlled via a setting) didn't change Rigid Body Physics performance on any of our ~150 test systems. I don't expect this issue will affect the majority of our users. It's trivial for us to filter out results that are potentially affected by the LAPIC timer bug -- we can exclude results gathered from Windows 10, or from systems that have a non-standard BCLK, or any one of the number of system metrics we collect. What we can't do is filter out Benchmate results because there's no way for us to identify those results! Again, I'll reiterate and say I understand that the community here is upset but I'm not comfortable with the Benchmate integration. If that means Geekbench is removed from HWBot that's disappointing but it's most certainly not my call to make.

Benchmate integration introduces a number of issues for us, both technical and legal. On the technical side, Benchmate has introduced issues that have prevented Geekbench from working properly, or have prevented Geekbench from accurately measuring performance. On the legal size, what if Benchmate's modifications to Geekbench cause Geekbench to delete data from a user's system and we get sued because of it? We may be shooting ourselves in the foot here, but I fear this is very much a damned if we do, damned if we don't decision in which case I'd rather make the decision that gives us the most control over our destiny.

Sorry, I'm still not comfortable with Benchmate integrating Geekbench. If that means HWBot no longer uses Geekbench then so be it.

Thanks to @GeorgeStorm for getting me back into my old account! Thanks, @mickulty, I appreciate the kind words. We've spent a lot of energy dealing with mobile vendors who manipulate Geekbench scores (see, e.g., https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2018/09/huawei-benchmark-boost/) but this has been a blind spot for us. I feel really dumb that we just assumed everything was ok. The team's been discussing strategies on how we can address this issue and I hope we'll have something to share in the coming weeks.

What sort of cheats are you wondering about? Geekbench is pretty good at preventing users from cheating on the benchmarks and preventing users from submitting fake results to the Geekbench Result Browser. However, users might be able to trick Geekbench's system information library Geekinfo into reporting the wrong hardware configuration (i.e., I've not spent any time "hardening" the library against cheating).