During its iPhone 15 Pro event, Apple highlighted the ability of the new phones to play console-quality games. Titles like Resident Evil Village, the Resident Evil 4 remake, and Ubisoft’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed Mirage will run natively on the devices.
This is a huge deal for anyone who wants to play the latest AAA titles on their smartphone without investing in a full-blown console.
Accessories
Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro offers a strong gaming experience, especially with the addition of ray-tracing support. This new feature will help to make the phones more competitive with consoles and PCs for high-end games.
Another big addition to the iPhone 15 is the Action button, which replaces the silent/ring switch with a clickable physical button you can program to perform a wide range of actions. You can use it to activate any Shortcuts you’ve created, silence or louden the phone, turn on the flashlight or launch apps like Voice Memos or Translate.
One accessory that can enhance your iPhone gaming experience is a magnetic wallet or case. Spigen’s Ultra Hybrid MagFit is a clear case that offers a simple design and great drop protection. It also has a magnet array in the back for MagSafe accessories.
A16 Bionic chip
The iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max have a new six-core GPU with hardware ray tracing acceleration. Apple says this is 4x faster than the previous A14 chip in the iPhone 14 Pro.
Apple also improved the Image Signal Processing (ISP) in these chips, which improves the quality of photos and videos. The new ISP can perform up to 4 trillion operations per photo.
Those improvements make the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max capable of running full-on console blockbusters natively, which is a big deal for mobile gaming. In fact, they can run many of these games better than PC versions that use the same processors.
ProMotion display
Apple devices are well known for having some of the best displays on the market, and the iPhone 15 Pro is no exception. Its ProMotion display feature is designed to make animations and other movements feel much smoother. Basically, it allows the display to ramp up or down to as high as 120Hz or as low as 10Hz depending on what you’re doing.
However, you’ll have to buy one of the Pro iPhone models to get this technology, as the regular base model still uses a 60Hz LTPO panel. According to a recent report from the Naver blog, this is because Apple’s main supplier for the iPhone 15 Pro series, BOE, doesn’t have enough capacity to add the 120Hz support to its non-Pro phones.
Storage for games
When Apple announced that games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4 remake would be playable on the iPhone 15 Pro, mobile gaming was turned on its head. These triple-A video games are normally available on consoles such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X or PC.
The iPhone 15 Pro could come with a 2TB storage option, according to supply chain sources cited by yeux1122. However, it’s worth taking these rumors with a pinch of salt as they have been wrong in the past.
In any case, the 256GB, 512GB and 1TB options are enough for most people who use their iPhones as primary gaming devices. They also score far higher than any Android phone in the Geekbench benchmark tests.
Battery life
In general, iPhones don’t get much better in terms of battery life year-on-year. Despite the efficiency of the new 3nm processor hardware and early rumors that Apple would spring for cutting-edge stacked battery technology, Apple’s published specs table reveals no change in the runtimes for the iPhone 15 series.
However, Apple made mobile gaming a major focus at its Wanderlust event, with the iPhone 15 Pro boasting the power to play high-profile modern games such as Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding. The ability to play these games natively on the device rather than using a cloud gaming service would represent a significant leap forward for mobile gaming.
Some hints at the iPhone 15 Pro’s performance have come from Geekbench results (listed as iPhone 16,2), which show single-core scores of 2,914 and multi-core results of 7,199. These are comparable to last year’s iPhone 14 Pro Max, which scored the same in both tests.