Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra tops speed benchmark. Garmin, where are you?

A community benchmark puts the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra at the top of the Zepp OS range, but its lead comes from faster storage rather than faster calculation.

Background

Amazfit’s launch release on 13 May 2026 claims the Cheetah 2 Ultra renders maps 2.5 times faster and refreshes them 12 times faster than before, and Amazfit made the same claim at the June launch of the Balance 3. The user-run ZeppBench results put Cheetah 2 Ultra top at 1,093, but calculation scores barely move between models, and its lead comes from two of the three storage tests.

Watch	Total score	Calculations	Local storage	EasyStorage	Large files
Cheetah 2 Ultra	1,093	n/a	804	498	402
Balance 3	967	2,639	777	305	326
Bip 6	963	2,633	866	357	274
T-Rex 3 Pro	896	2,442	659	372	184
Balance 2	863	2,606	562	278	277
T-Rex Ultra 2	860	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
T-Rex 3	755	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Active 2	401	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

Source: ZeppBench community database

A Reddit post by u/oa_i credits the faster maps to 8 MB of on-chip memory in the “S” revision chips (ZPS3044S in Balance 3 and HS3s in Cheetah 2 Ultra), up from about 2.5 MB. It’s a good theory, but it comes from a Redditor, not Zepp. The same post claims the Cheetah 2 Pro’s HS3 chip misses out and that the Ultra’s chip cleans up GPS tracks in canyons and forests. I’m not convinced by either.

What it means

The hard numbers say the newest Amazfit chips aren’t any faster at number-crunching than a Balance 2. What has improved is how fast the watch moves data in and out of memory and storage, which fits Amazfit’s own claims about map rendering, since maps are the heaviest data job a watch does. The memory theory makes sense, but the benchmark doesn’t test maps at all. Bip 6 scores almost the same as Balance 3, yet Amazfit recently blamed memory for limiting Bip 6 updates, so the headline score clearly misses something.

Nothing changes for owners. For buyers, Amazfit’s map claims apply only to the Balance 3 and Cheetah 2 Ultra, so anyone who leans on maps mid-run should stick to those two. Ignore the GPS claim. Satellite tracking runs on a separate positioning chip, and the Cheetah 2 Ultra scored 85% in the5krunner’s 10-mile accuracy test – pretty darn good but not the very best.

Why Garmin maps still lag

Garmin has the opposite problem. Its maps are vector, not raster, so the watch draws every road, path and contour line from raw data each time you pan or zoom. COROS sends pre-drawn image tiles instead, which take far less processing. The Fenix 8 Pro does that drawing on a 2020 processor with 5MB of RAM, compared with about 37MB on the chip COROS, Suunto, and Polar use. The Fenix 9 Pro has 50% more RAM, but in my map lag tests it still took up to 6 seconds to pan with layers on and up to 15 seconds to redraw when zoomed out. The Amazfit T-Rex Ultra 2, on Amazfit’s older chip, passed the same test comfortably.

Quick answers

Which Amazfit watch has the fastest processor?
Cheetah 2 Ultra has the highest community ZeppBench score at 1,093, ahead of Balance 3 at 967. Its lead comes from storage speed, and calculation scores are almost the same across recent models.

Does Cheetah 2 Ultra have more memory than Balance 2?
Probably. A Reddit analysis puts it at 8 MB of on-chip memory against about 2.5 MB on older chips, though Amazfit doesn’t say.

Source and original research by: the5krunner and r/amazfit.

Last Updated on 3 November 2026 by tfk the5krunner

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tfk the5krunner

tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors. See the gear tfk uses. ID