Apple has finally unveiled its next-gen A17 Pro SOC which features a brand new GPU that packs ray tracing support, MetalFX Upscaling & brings AAA games to iPhones.
Apple Brings AAA Games To iPhones With The Power of A17 Pro Chip, New GPU Enables Ray Tracing & MetalFX Upscaling Support
Some key announcements were made during the Apple event such as Apple bringing its very first hardware-accelerate ray tracing support to its iPhone 15 Pro lineup with the power of its A17 Pro SOC. This new chip features a new Apple-designed shader architecture with a total of 6 cores and up to 20% faster performance than the previous generation. Other key improvements have been made in the efficiency and mesh shading departments.
The announcement comes a few months after Samsung unveiled its own hardware-accelerated ray tracing solution featured within its flagship Galaxy S23 lineup. The lineup leverages AMD's RDNA 2 graphics for its ray tracing and graphics capabilities with a RDNA 3 variant seemingly planned for a future smartphone family.
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Series Without Ray Tracing:
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Series With HW-Accelerated Ray Tracing:
According to Apple, the A17 Pro features 4x faster performance in ray-traced applications with the demo showcasing a software-based and a hardware-accelerated comparison. The software-based solution only managed sub-10 FPS while the hardware-accelerated ray tracing demo delivered 30 FPS consistently.
Apple also points out its very rich App Store and Gaming ecosystem which brings high-quality apps to its users while supporting the best handheld controllers in the market such as PS5's Dual-Sense wireless. Furthermore, a major feature coming to Apple iPhone 15 Pro will be support for MetalFX upscaling.
Upscaling technologies have seen huge adoption in the PC and console space so it was about time that smartphones adopted this technology too to deliver faster frame rates while being more efficient. Apple claims that using MetalFX, the iPhone 15 Pro series not only runs faster but also consumes lower power leading to higher battery times while enjoying your games. The MetalFX upscaling technology utilizes both the GPU cores and the Neural Engine cores which include 16 cores with up to 2 times the performance of the previous generation with a rated AI compute power of up to 35 TOPs.
As for new games, Apple has plenty of those with the company partnering up with Ubisoft and Capcom to bring AAA experiences such as Resident Evil IV Remake and Resident Evil VIII Village to iPhone gamers by the end of this year. Death Stranding is also planned to launch for iPhone 15 Pro series smartphones this year.
Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, and Death Stranding are coming to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max later this year. Assassin’s Creed Mirage will be available in the first half of 2024.
Ubisoft will also be bringing a new title known as The Division: Resurgence in early 2024 followed by a native gameplay experience of its highly anticipated Assassin's Creed Mirage later next year. For more details on the Apple iPhone 15 Pro lineup and A17 Pro SOC, you can read over coverage here.
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