Apple Claims That The A18 Pro For The iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max Can Deliver Up To 200 Percent Faster Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing Than A17 Pro

The A18 Pro exclusively powers the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, with Apple making bold statements about its top-end 3nm chipset for mobile devices. One of them was hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which is a feature that was supported by last year’s A17 Pro. While we should get a decent gaming performance bump with the latest SoC compared to the previous generation, the technology giant says that that difference could be twice as much in hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

With the A18 Pro, Apple says that with Game Mode enabled, users can expect better sustained framerates for prolonged gaming sessions

During the announcement, Apple revealed some performance charts, claiming that the A18 Pro GPU was up to 20 percent faster than the A17 Pro, with the CPU being 15 percent faster. In pure rasterization terms, when running games, the technology giant has yet to reveal those figures, but combined with an improved thermal solution, we should see the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max almost immediately outperforming their direct predecessors, the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.

On the subject of hardware-accelerated ray tracing, Apple has likely incorporated the A18 Pro with better dedicated cores and ran some tests in which the SoC obtained a 200 percent gain against the A17 Pro. Unfortunately, we have not seen these performance claims when running the latest AAA games. Right now, Apple’s iPhones are the only mobile devices that can run these titles natively and without any emulation, so it is a testament to how capable these chipsets are.

Apple also reminds those who plan on getting the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max to enable Game Mode on iOS 18. With the feature enabled, the company states that users will experience better sustained frame rates for prolonged gaming sessions. Last year, Apple missed an opportunity with the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max as it failed to add a robust cooling solution that would prevent the A17 Pro thermals from exceeding an acceptable threshold. This year, we are excited to see what improvements are made and if the ray tracing upgrades are worthy of warranting a purchase.