Recap: There was a lot to take in during Apple's Wonderlust event, especially when it comes to games on the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple said its device represents the "next generation of mobile gaming," offering native support for massive titles such as Assassin's Creed Mirage and the Resident Evil 4 Remake.
Native mobile games - as in, those not being streamed from the cloud or other devices - have improved a lot over the last few years, but they're still not on the same level as modern PC or console titles. Apple says that will change with iPhone 15 Pro.
Apple is promising a slew of gaming-specific features in the iPhone 15 Pro, including a brand-new GPU with an Apple-designed shader architecture. The company said it focused on performance and efficiency, complex applications, and new rendering features in the 3nm A17 Pro's 6-core GPU, which is 20% faster than its predecessor.
Sribalan Santhanam, VP of Apple's silicon engineering group, said that for the first time, the GPU also offers hardware-accelerated ray tracing, "featuring the fastest ray-tracing performance in any smartphone." Apple said the GPU offers up to four times faster ray tracing compared to software ray tracing on the A16 Bionic.
Some games coming to the iPhone 15 Pro this year include Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and Death Stranding, while The Division Resurgence, which is a FTP mobile game, and Assassin's Creed Mirage will arrive next year.
"This is the first time the console version of Assassin's Creed will be natively available on a smartphone," said Apple's SVP of marketing, Greg Joswiak. The next entry in the Assassin's Creed series, Mirage, lands on the PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and Xbox One on October 5, ahead of its release on iPhone 15 Pro in the first half of 2024.
Apple made plenty of impressive claims about the iPhone 15 Pro's gaming abilities during yesterday's event, though it might be best to reserve judgment until the titles arrive on the device.
Apple's iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will be available to pre-order starting September 15 in four colors: natural titanium, blue titanium, white titanium, or black titanium. The phones will launch and ship to customers a week later on September 22.