The all-new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max has been released today and Amazon is calling it its most powerful streaming stick ever, going as far as to print it on the box. You should certainly expect it to be more powerful than the original Fire TV Stick 4K, since it has a stronger CPU, GPU, and more RAM. But how much more powerful is it and can it possibly even beat out the Google Chromecast dongle? I have the new Firestick 4K Max in hand and put it through my usual benchmark tests so read on to find out.
As a reminder, benchmark scores are a poor way of judging a device’s real-world performance because they push a device to its limits, which hardly ever happens in everyday use. That said, they do provide an even playing field to directly compare the raw power of one device to another, so, in that sense, they provide a decent idea of how well devices will perform relative to each other in normal use. I ran each benchmark 3 times at the device’s max resolution and averaged the top 2 runs.
Geekbench is a very good overall benchmark utility and has become the go-to for many people to rank Android devices. It primarily taxes the CPU but also tests things like the RAM and rolls it all into a final score for both a single CPU core and all CPU cores. As you can see, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max pulled off a great multi-core score of 2506, easily beating out the previous budget streaming device leaders, the Google Chromecast and the Walmart Onn 4K Box. That’s pretty damn impressive for a stick form factor device to beat out a dongle/pendant and box form factor. It’s amazing that a firestick is now edging pretty close to the CPU performance of the much-loved 2nd-gen Fire TV box.
Comparing the Fire TV Stick 4K Max with the Fire TV Stick 4K is no contest. When the original Firestick 4K was released, it was pretty impressive that Amazon fit so much power into such a small form factor. So, it’s impressive that they’ve managed to improve it by 25% without changing the size. For anyone cross-shopping the Fire TV Stick 4K Max with the 3rd-gen Fire TV Stick for use on a 1080p TV, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max scored 2608 on this benchmark at the lower 1080p resolution.
The GFXBench T-Rex benchmark is a graphical test that primarily taxes the GPU of the device. This mainly measures the device’s local gaming capabilities, but the GPU does come into play in everyday non-gaming use for rendering the interface. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max absolutely crushed this test, beating out even the 1st-gen Fire TV box, which was pushed heavily as a gaming device. With the advent of remote cloud gaming services like Amazon Luna, local gaming on streaming devices isn’t as popular as it once was, but it’s nice to see that the Fire TV Stick 4K Max still has plenty of power to pull it off.
The Fire TV Stick 4K Max scored a whopping 45% higher on this gaming benchmark than the next highest budget device, the Google Chromecast. Relative to the original Fire TV Stick 4K, it scored a 50% more powerful GPU score and, once again, edged pretty darn close to the 2nd-gen Fire TV box. You can see by the clumping of recent devices in the low-800 score range that the Fire TV Stick 4K Max’s score of 1201 stands out and has taken GPU performance in its form-factor to another level.
When the Fire TV Stick 4K Max was introduced, Amazon claimed that it was 40% more powerful than its predecessor, the original Fire TV Stick 4K. I have to say I was very skeptical of that claim and worried that they were setting everyone up for the same disappointment that we experienced when Nvidia claimed the new Shield TV was 25% more powerful but hardly scored higher at all than the previous model in reality. While the new Fire TV Stick 4K Max certainly isn’t 40% more powerful than the previous model in all regards, it’s certainly pulling it off in some areas and then some.
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Great article. Where does the FireTV Pendant fall in on the first graph? Thanks, Bob
The Fire TV pendant is the “Fire TV 3” on both graphs.
Thank you
Hello,
I am upgrading from the Fire TV 3, I should notice a nice improvement in apps loading and starting?
I’m actually testing app loading times across all Fire TV models right now and will have an article up soon. Compared to the Fire TV 3, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max starts apps about 45% faster.
Nice. The new 4K Max stick is scheduled to be delivered today. Should be a nice upgrade. Now I just wish that certain apps would load of the storage.
thank you so much, i was waiting for this.
I have a question though, is there an option to turn off HDR ? or still no ?
your reply is highly appreciated
Hell yeah there finally is! There are now 3 options: Alaway HDR, Adaptive, and Disable HDR. https://www.aftvnews.com/fire-tv-stick-4k-max-finally-has-the-option-to-disable-hdr-entirely/
Finally :))))
Thank you so much Elias, your reviews are always the best.
Why do you want to turn HDR off?
If HDR has been implemented poorly, either by the TV or the video being played, the content will sometimes look better with HDR turned off.
How often does this happen?
No wonder my original Fire TV Cube drives me crazy. Its performance here is really pitiful.
Sure is – that’s why I upgraded to Cube 2 ;-)
Yeah, the original Fire TV Cube was underpowered. It has the same CPU/GPU as the Fire TV 3 pendant, which does fine in the pendant, but the Cube eats up nearly an entire core of the CPU due to the always-listening mics, so it cripples itself a bit. The 2nd-gen Fire TV Cube fixes that by switching from a 4-core to a 6-core processor, so it has cores to spare.
What’s seems interesting is the performance between the older 4k stick, stick 3, and the lite. They are sold at different prices but seem to be pushing the same performance.
The hardware in the Stick 3 and Stick Lite are identical. The price difference is just due to the cheaper remote that comes with the Stick Lite. The CPU/GPU in the Stick 4K is basically just a 4K version of the CPU/GPU in the Stick 3/Lite. So all three essentially share the same CPU/GPU with small differences, that’s why they all score equally.
How does the benchmark for the Stick 4K compare with the Stick 3 and Stick Lite when it is tested at 1080p?
The original Fire TV Stick 4K running at 1080p performs slightly better than the 3rd-gen Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite. Original Fire TV stick 4K scores 710 single-core and 2131 multi-core scores for Geekbench and scores 810 for GFXBench when set to 1080p.
Does this have Atmos on Netflix like the Cube 2? For whatever reason, Atmos was excluded on Netflix with the regular Stick 4K.
Yes, it does support Atmos on Netflix.
Between 2015-2020 FireTV was the clear winner in this category. That has changed since early to mid 2020 with the arrival of Chromecast 4K and the ONN 4K. The performance of those devices are practically on par, interface cleaner, easily able to debloat and finally not limited to the poor Amazon appstore. The ONN 4K impressed me a lot for its value, the only bad thing about it is the sad 6gb of internal storage it comes with. It makes up for it by given you the best of both world (Amazon/Google).
Does the ONN have Dolby vision? Dolby atmos? Wi-Fi 6? ALLM? AV1 support? Yep, I didn’t think so.
The ONN UHD has the same 8gb ROM as these other devices. 4.8 usable which is less than 5.4 Fire Stick 4k has and more than the 4.4 the Chromecast with Google TV has.
Surprised to see the Cube 2 score higher than the latest Shield and almost as high as the earlier model on Geekbench, if I’m reading that right. I have all three of those and I would not have guessed that.
Great comparison. Where would the original Shield TV (2015?) labs in this comparison?
Thanks much!
The hardware of the 2015 Shield TV 1 and 2017 Shield TV 2 are nearly identical, so I assume the 2015 and 2017 would perform aboutthe same, but I don’t have a 2015 to test to know for sure.
So in other words..the FireStick still lagging and is slower?
With the performance of the Fire TV 2nd Generation box it beats me why Amazon don’t see fit to update it to their newest interface.
At least they could give users the option to do so perhaps.
i’m curious as to where the Mi Stick would land on that graph. do you have one you can test?
it’s the worst. please don’t buy it.
Still waiting for HomeKit/AirPlay 2 on Sticks and Cube.
I know the Firestick 4K Max is better than the Google Chromecast in terms of raw performance but how do both compare with each other in terms of being a Plex client? For the love of God, I hated my Firestick 4K as it was full of Plex client bugs!
The two perform about equally regarding Plex. Any bugs in Plex will usually be due to the app itself and not the device, so you’ll probably see them on all models until Plex fixes them.
This is not accurate. The bugs that I’m experiencing are only happening to my Fire Stick 4K. They don’t happen when I use my Nvidia Shield Pro and the Plex app in my LG OLED TV’s. How can you explain that?
Bugs can be platform-dependent.
Is this blog still being looked into by the blogger? I don’t see a reply to my question.
Nice comparison but how does the fact that the 4K Max is a wifi 6 device play into it? I bought a wifi 6 mesh system and have been impressed with the speeds compared to my AC mesh.
Scores you got are on Geekbench 4 or Geekbench 5?
Geekbench v4.4.0
It would great if you could include Roku models and Apple TV models in this benchmark tests
Also if you could include Shield TV 1 (2015) in future benchmark tests.