In context: During Apple’s Wonderlust occasion, it appeared desperate to hype the iPhone 15 Pro’s potential to deal with AAA video games, calling the gadget the “subsequent technology of cellular gaming.” Cupertino claims the telephone can natively run massive, high-fidelity video games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and even Death Stranding, with hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
All these titles and extra are getting native iOS ports, however can the iPhone 15 actually deal with such taxing video games? The reply will not be a easy sure. Wccftech notes that in leaked pre-release Geekbench 6 assessments, the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro solely held a single-digit benefit over the A16 Bionic. More current benchmarks present the A17 with a significantly higher 20-percent enchancment over the A16. That looks like a modest acquire, nevertheless it could be sufficient further juice to drive a triple-A recreation.
As it seems, it’s sufficient horsepower to play a recreation like Resident Evil Village, however not with out some “beefy” exterior cooling answer. Chinese {hardware} reviewer Geekerwan carried out in depth assessments with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and revealed that it experiences excessive thermal throttling with floor temperatures reaching 48C (118F) throughout benchmarking.
Apple claimed that the A17 Pro was 4 occasions quicker than the A16 Bionic when performing ray-tracing duties. This brag could be legitimate for a brief run, however for a gaming session of various minutes, the gadget will get so sizzling that thermal throttling kicks in, dropping frames per second from the mid-40s to round 30fps whereas working Resident Evil Village.
While this information is considerably disappointing, it is too early to say that the iPhone 15 professional will not run AAA video games nicely. The main cause is that the RE Village recreation Geekerwan used was not the official iOS model, which does not actually have a strong launch date but. He sideloaded it to the gadget, in all probability working on an emulator, which isn’t a one-to-one comparability.
Capcom will presumably (hopefully?) do fairly a little bit of optimization for the official iOS launch. As we all know, optimization is an important a part of recreation design on any platform, together with high-end PCs. It is the distinction between a recreation struggling to run like crap or cruising alongside buttery clean. For instance, the extremely optimized Genshin Impact ran on the A17 Pro at a clean 59.1fps. Unfortunately, that was solely marginally higher than the A16 Bionic which may run it at 56.5fps.
While it is clever to carry our expectations in examine, it appears untimely to write down off the iPhone 15 as a gaming gadget, sight unseen. Let’s see the way it performs whereas working the official port.
