Apple said the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max will be able to natively run console games and AAA console titles like 'Resident Evil' and 'Assassin's Creed Mirage'. At its recently concluded 'Wonderlust' event, the tech giant said its latest mobile chipset - A17 Pro Bionic, which powers the iPhone 15 Pro series brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing support, something even the latest Macs cannot do. Apple claims that hardware ray tracing is 4x faster than software-based solutions. While this may be true for desktop GPU, with AMD's Radeon lineup offering significantly less performance than NVIDIA's RTX GPU series, which has dedicated Ray-Tracing cores, it remains to be seen how Apple's latest GPU will perform in games with ray-tracing support. Based on TSMC's 3nm process node, Apple says the pro-class GPU is 20 per cent faster compared to its predecessor and features a new 6-core design that is more energy efficient. The A17 Pro Bionic also features mesh shading, enabling games to display more detailed environments while drawing less power. It also brings support for the AV1 decoder, a feature often found on mid and high-range GPUs. Apple has confirmed that the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will be able to natively run titles like Death Stranding, Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil Village and Ubisoft's upcoming Assassin's Creed Mirage. While the first three games will be available sometime later this year, Assassin's Creed Mirage for iPhone is expected to launch in the first half of 2024. However, the tech giant is yet to share details on how long the device battery will last when playing graphic-intensive AAA titles. In the last few years, iPhones have been gaining momentum amongst gamers. While many prefer Android devices for gaming because of fast charging or other reasons, Apple's Bionic chipsets do not suffer from the same level of thermal throttling as Qualcomm's recently launched Snapdragon chipsets. With more AAA console and PC games coming to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, Apple might be planning to take on handheld gaming consoles like the Lenovo Legion Go and ROG Ally, which allow you to play PC games on the go but only for a couple of hours. Also, it might make more sense to buy a more expensive smartphone that can double up as a gaming console instead of opting for a separate device. The iPhone 15 Pro starts from Rs 1,34,900 whereas the iPhone 15 Pro Max can be purchased from Rs 1,59,900.
