Why Is the Fenix 9 Pro Garmin’s Fastest Ever Watch?

The Fenix 9 Pro currently tops the overall speed leaderboard on WristBench, a public Connect IQ benchmark for Garmin watches. Its overall score of 176 is the highest on record. The catch is that this result comes from just two submitted devices, so the site gives a confidence score of only 58 percent. But why is it fast?

We have already looked at what is physically different between the Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro component by component. WristBench looks at whether any of that difference shows up as measurable speed and the potential causes.

In brief: how WristBench works and scores

Garmin owners install a free Connect IQ app, run four short tests, and submit the results to a public leaderboard at benchmark.wristtale.com. The leaderboard currently holds 524 submitted runs across 61 device groups.

WristBench runs four artificial tasks inside Connect IQ, so it’s not a hardware benchmark in the conventional sense.

• Logic pushes 1,000 integers through 256 passes of bitwise operations followed by a sort, timed in milliseconds. Lower is faster.
• Memory builds strings of characters, slices them repeatedly, and churns through 5,000 short-lived dictionary objects, timed in milliseconds. Lower is faster.
• Storage (I/O) writes, reads and deletes 500 small keys in the watch’s app storage, timed in milliseconds. Lower is faster. This measures the storage interface a Connect IQ app sees, not the watch’s raw flash speed, and it is not the same operation as Garmin’s native activity-save pipeline you experience at the end of workouts.
• UI draws 500 shapes and text elements per frame for five seconds and counts how many frames complete. Higher is faster. This is the closest of the four tests to general screen responsiveness, menus, data-screen transitions, watch face animation, but it does not test map rendering, a perennial bugbear for owners of every Garmin Fenix watch. A map involves loading tiles and routing data as well as drawing them, and WristBench does not touch that part of the pipeline.

Every result carries a confidence score, built from how many distinct devices contributed results (65 percent of the weighting), how consistent those results were (25 percent), and how many runs came back valid (10 percent). The Fenix 9 Pro’s 58 percent sits well below the leaderboard’s most trusted entries, which run past 90 percent on dozens of devices.

Fenix 9 Pro’s claim, by the numbers

Test	Fenix 9 Pro result	Devices	Confidence
Overall average	176 (highest on leaderboard)	2	58%
Logic	not a category leader	2	58%
Memory	not a category leader	2	58%
UI	not a category leader	2	58%

The Fenix 9 Pro does not lead any individual test. Its overall average is highest because WristBench’s weighting favours memory and screen rendering, and the Fenix 9 Pro scores well across all four rather than leading in any one.

Screen rendering (UI), fastest 3

Device	Frames rendered	Runs	Confidence
vívoactive 6	12	8	78%
Venu 4 (45mm / D2 Air X1)	11	7	71%
Venu 4 (41mm)	11	3	61%

Logic (integer/sort), fastest 3

Device	Time	Runs	Confidence
vívoactive 6	27,919 ms	8	78%
Venu 4 (45mm / D2 Air X1)	29,755 ms	7	71%
Venu 4 (41mm)	31,231 ms	3	61%

Memory, fastest 3

Device	Time	Runs	Confidence
Forerunner 70	10,166 ms	1	40%
Fenix E	11,092 ms	1	50%
Fenix 8 (43mm)	11,118 ms	2	56%

Storage (I/O), fastest 3

Device	Time	Runs	Confidence
Forerunner 170	18,991 ms	2	48%
Forerunner 70	19,653 ms	1	40%
Forerunner 955 / Solar	21,804 ms	32	93%

Overall average, top 5 raw

Device	Average score	Runs	Confidence
Fenix 9 Pro (47mm)	176	2	58%
Venu X1	175	6	50%
Forerunner 265s	170	6	76%
Venu 3	170	6	76%
Fenix 8 (43mm)	170	2	56%

Restricting the leaderboard to models with at least 15 submitted devices removes the Fenix 9 Pro from the picture entirely and gives a steadier answer that some prior-gen Forerunner owners will be pleased about:

Overall average, 15+ devices, top 5

Device	Average score	Runs	Confidence
Forerunner 955 / Solar	165	32	93%
Forerunner 265	161	54	83%
Forerunner 965	159	45	89%
Forerunner 255	156	62	95%
Fenix 7X / Tactix 7 / Quatix 7X Solar / Enduro 2	141	30	97%

The Forerunner 955/Solar is the closest thing to a true answer for the fastest ever Garmin watch, backed by 32 devices and 93 percent confidence.

This site and plenty of Fenix 8 and Fenix 8 Pro owners have reported slow map panning, zooming and redraws, including on Garmin’s own forums, and those reports are real, current, and likely won’t change any time soon. WristBench cannot confirm or rule out that complaint, because its UI test never touches map data. Whether the Fenix 9 Pro fixes that in practice is a separate question this benchmark does not answer either, but early looks at zooming on the Fenix 9 show a 2-second lag, still noticeable, but a real improvement on the 10-second zooms/pans I saw on older Garmins.

For the technically curious: how the score is actually calculated

WristBench does not just average four raw numbers. Each metric is normalised against a fixed baseline before it is weighted: Logic against 2,000ms, Memory against 3,500ms, I/O against 1,500ms, and UI against 60 frames.

Time-based metrics score as (Base Time / Actual Time) × 1000, so a watch that beats the baseline time scores above 1,000 on that metric. The UI metric inverts that logic, scoring as (Actual Frames / Base Frames) × 1000, since more frames rendered is better rather than less time taken. The four normalised scores then feed into the familiar weighting: Logic 25 percent, Memory 35 percent, UI 30 percent, I/O 10 percent.

The CPU-heavy Logic phase is deliberately sliced into short steps rather than run as one continuous block. Connect IQ’s watchdog will kill an app that blocks the runtime for too long in one pass, so WristBench breaks the workload up to keep the app responsive between slices. The timer, called via System.getTimer(), still spans the entire phase regardless of the slicing, so the elapsed time measured is unaffected.

The leaderboard does not trust client-submitted scores either. Each watch uploads raw metrics, logicMs, memoryMs, ioMs and uiFrames, and the server recalculates every component score and the final weighted score independently, using the same public formula. Results are then aggregated by Garmin model, averaged across every distinct device that submitted for that model, which is why a model with two submitted devices produces a much less stable average than one with thirty-two.

WristBench is unofficial, crowdsourced and still growing. Half of the 61 device groups on the leaderboard currently rest on five or fewer submitted devices, several on just one, and the Fenix 9 Pro is one of them. Every additional submitted device tightens the confidence score and either confirms or overturns the Fenix 9 Pro’s current lead, and the Quick answers below cover how to add one.

Quick answers

Is the Fenix 9 Pro really Garmin's fastest watch?
It holds the highest overall score on WristBench’s leaderboard, though that figure is built from only two watches and a 58 percent confidence score. The most reliably fast watch on the leaderboard, backed by a large sample, is the Forerunner 955/Solar.

Does WristBench test how fast Garmin maps load or pan?
No. Its UI test measures general screen drawing speed using shapes and text, not map tiles or routing data.

How do I add my own result to WristBench?
Install the WristBench app from the Connect IQ Store and submit a run at benchmark.wristtale.com.

Last Updated on 31 August 2026 by the5krunner