The A17 Pro has several technological breakthroughs, including the first smartphone SoC to be mass produced on TSMC’s 3nm architecture and the first Apple silicon to officially support hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The company definitely wants to hype the capabilities of its latest chipset, especially compared to the A16 Bionic, though it should be noted that the latter does not support this graphical improvement natively.
The A16 Bionic was originally supposed to feature ray tracing, but Apple’s engineers pulled the plug due to multiple issues
Though Apple does not make it a habit to compare chipsets that launched a year ago, likely due to the lack of monumental differences, the marketing material shows a different side. For instance, with the A17 Pro now officially supporting ray tracing, the company makes it a point that the new SoC is four times faster than the A16 Bionic. However, according to an earlier report, Apple’s engineers were originally supposed to give last year’s flagship silicon ray tracing support, but the feature did not make it to the final iteration.
The report claimed that with ray tracing enabled, the A16 Bionic suffered from a high power draw, resulting in overheating and thermal throttling. However, it is possible for the chipset to enable ray tracing in games for supported applications through software, but as we have seen in desktop graphic cards, without dedicated ray tracing cores, performance suffers heavily.
Even Apple states the following in its comparison that the iPhone 15 Pro uses hardware-accelerated ray tracing for the first time, making it significantly faster than software-based ray tracing, making the comparison slightly unfair.
“iPhone 15 Pro uses hardware-accelerated ray tracing for the first time — that’s up to four times faster than software-based ray tracing, delivering more fluid graphics and true-to-life lighting. It’s the fastest ray-tracing performance in a smartphone.”
In a detailed post, Apple demonstrated the ray tracing performance in a demo, with the A17 Bionic obtaining an impressive 30FPS, while the other obtained less than 10FPS. The comparison will be more interesting with the graphical feature disabled, revealing the rasterization capabilities between the two SoCs.
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