With the new 3rd-gen Fire TV Cube being released tomorrow, I decided this was a good time to refresh all the benchmark scores for all competing devices so that everything was on an even playing field, since scores can change over time due to software updates. While no device ever scores exactly the same as before when rerunning benchmarks, especially when years have passed between tests, the two scores are usually close enough to not make much of a difference. As I retested the streaming devices in my arsenal, it became clear that the scores that dropped the most were the ones from devices that updated from Android 9 and 10 to Android 11 and 12, like the Nvidia Shield TV and the Google Chromecast 4K. The performance hit, from software updates alone, was as much as 12% in one case. Read more ›