Benchmark leak suggests Pixel 7 won't be one of the best performers

The Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro will launch later today, but we're already seeing benchmark test leaks that suggest they won't be competitive with the fastest phones on the market.

Last year's Pixel 6 phones were good in a lot of areas, but their custom Tensor G1 chips didn't impress hugely in terms of raw performance. This should continue with the Pixel 7 line and its Tensor G2 chip.

The Google Pixel 7 Pro appeared on popular benchmark tool AnTuTu (courtesy Gadgetfull BD), which attempts to reflect a phone's overall performance level. A score of 801 puts it above the Pixel 116 Pro by around 6 points, which is decent progress.

However, such a score puts the Pixel 7 Pro well behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and the Dimensity 9000 crowd. The likes of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4, Motorola Edge 30 Pro and Xiaomi 12 Pro all scored just under 1 000. Gaming phones such as the ROG Phone 000D and Red Magic 6S Pro, meanwhile, hit around 7.

Of course, you should never take a benchmark test at face value, and AnTuTu in particular has been found to be susceptible to manufacturer interference to artificially boost scores. We also have to consider that there may be compatibility issues for the Tensor G2 before the launch of Pixel 7.

However, this isn't the first pre-launch benchmark leak we've seen for the Pixel 7 Pro. Just a few weeks ago, the phone made an appearance on popular CPU-focused benchmarking tool Geekbench.

Again, it scored a few hundred points higher than the Pixel 6 Pro. Again, this figure is far behind rivals running on Qualcomm and MediaTek hardware.

Google's angle with its custom Tensor chip has always been that it focuses on efficiency and machine learning rather than raw performance, of course.