iPhone 15 Pro hardware-based ray tracing promises more realistic gaming
Apple's latest flagship, the iPhone 15 Pro, promises the best gaming experience on any smartphone with hardware-based ray tracing, thanks to changes Apple's made to the A17 Pro powering the device.
The iPhone 15 Pro is powered by Apple's A17 Pro chipset, the fastest ever in a handset, according to Apple. The chip is the industry's first manufactured using a 3 nanometer (nm) process.
Among the many improvements is "the biggest redesign in the history of Apple's GPUs," providing 20% faster performance overall. The A17 Pro's GPU is a six-core design which provides better peak performance and attains improved energy efficiency, Apple claims.
"The groundbreaking innovation of A17 Pro9 is a brand new GPU, with a new Apple-designed shader architecture, our biggest redesign in the history of Apple GPUs," said Sribalan Santhanam, Apple's VP, Silicon Engineering Group.
"This is a Pro-class GPU that expands what's possible on iPhone even more. We focused on three things: improving performance and efficiency, running complex applications, and adding new rendering features," Santhanam explained.
Those new features include mesh shading, which combines vertex and primitive processing into a single pipeline. This enables games to create more detailed environments while drawing less power, according to Apple.
iPhone 15 Pro is the first iPhone to provide hardware-based ray tracing capabilities, a feature heretofore the domain of higher-end gaming PCs - and something the Mac can't yet do. Games and other apps that support ray tracing can render dramatically more realistic shadows, water, lighting and atmospheric effects.
Apple's not the first company to introduced hardware-based ray tracing for mobile devices: Qualcomm and Samsung both beat the company to the punch with new mobile chips capable of ray tracing. Apple says A17 Pro offers the fastest ray-tracing performance in any smartphone to date, however.
Apple also touted the A17 Pro's support for MetalFX Upscaling, which leverages the chip's GPU and Neural Engine to upscale lower-resolution graphics and textures to higher resolution ones, while using less power.
The A17 Pro's new graphics capability is enabling a new generation of mobile games including Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding, all expected later this year. Also on deck is Assassin's Creed Mirage, expected in the first half of 2024.
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A16 is around half the performance of M1 and about the same as the Steam Deck so A17 will be somewhere between A16 and M1.
M1 can run Resident Evil Village at 60FPS on medium quality:
Steam Deck can run Resident Evil 4 at 40-60FPS at 720p:
Given that there is hardware raytracing now, that's likely to make it to Mac too with M3. That will help beyond games for raytraced rendering. They noted the speedup as 4x over software rendering so this will close the gap between the M-series Macs and higher-end Nvidia GPUs (M2 Ultra on page 2 at 1/4 the NVidia 4090):
Blender opendata
This won't be until later in 2024 but it's a very useful hardware feature. Nvidia had examples of how much their hardware RT improved rendering speed vs software:
It doesn't apply to the whole frame time but it reduces the lighting rendering part significantly, leaving an overall 2-3x speedup over software raytracing. Software raytracing isn't used much in games but for games, hardware raytracing increases the realism of the lighting, reflections and shadows:
Bringing AAA games to mobile is also a good strategy. The Mac doesn't have the userbase for gaming but iOS does so if AAA devs will be willing to port to iOS, it's a lot easier to target Mac after the iOS port is done. The full desktop titles are around 60-80GB so they will likely lower the texture quality for mobile and this will help with the lower memory available.
By the current pattern, the M3 would be based on the A16 but it sounds like this GPU would be a much-needed improvement for the Mac and probably pretty required for the VisionPro. Seem like the M3 could leapfrog the A16 and be based on the A17.
The NE and GPU cores are needed for machine learning applications, and that's where they basically put all the additional transistors with TSMC 3nm. Basically all new features are machine learning driven in some form or another.
It's a must for Vision Pro with the power saving and raytracing will allow more realistic rendering to blend with the real world.
I'm beginning to think they might have a March event where they launch M3 in a bunch of products - Vision Pro, MBA, iMac, possibly mini.
One sticking point will be price. Console players are used to paying $60 for a game, mobile players aren't (yet). It's reported they will go a similar route as Nintendo with Super Mario Run where it's free to play the first level and then ask for a full game purchase. This will let mobile players see if the game runs ok on their device and the controls feel good:
https://toucharcade.com/2023/09/13/resident-evil-4-remake-ipad-macos-iphone-pro-supported-devices-price-purchase-village-release-date/
I don't think they'll manage $60 but they said it would be single purchase and the Mac version would likely be that price, maybe the Mac version will be separate and shared just for iPhone/iPad. Square Enix charges relatively high prices with some of their games:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app-bundle/final-fantasy-iv-complete-pac/id918388546 ($15 per game)
Capcom charges $40 for Resident Evil Village on Switch. I think $20 would be the limit for a single purchase for mobile. They'd probably be better redesigning parts of the game like charge for save ribbons, weapons, lockpicks. $5 for weapons pack, $5 for costumes, $2 for a ribbon pack, $20 for the game etc. People always say they don't want to be microtransactioned to death but that's the only way people buy things on mobile. Maybe these games can change that habit but I doubt it, not in the short-term anyway.
The sales potential is huge. 1.5 billion iPhone/iPad users, only newer devices can play them of course but if they get 20 million sales at $20, that's $400m (-30%) from one platform.