Apple A17 Pro GPU Features Ray Tracing, MetalFX Upscaling: Resident Evil IV Remake, Village & Assassin’s Creed Mirage Coming To iPhones

wccftech.com:

Apple has finally unveiled its next-gen A17 Pro SOC which features a brand new GPU that packs ray tracing support, MetalFX Upscaling & brings AAA games to iPhones.

Some key announcements were made during the Apple event such as Apple bringing its very first hardware-accelerate ray tracing support to its iPhone 15 Pro lineup with the power of its A17 Pro SOC. This new chip features a new Apple-designed shader architecture with a total of 6 cores and up to 20% faster performance than the previous generation. Other key improvements have been made in the efficiency and mesh shading departments.

The announcement comes a few months after Samsung unveiled its own hardware-accelerated ray tracing solution featured within its flagship Galaxy S23 lineup. The lineup leverages AMD's RDNA 2 graphics for its ray tracing and graphics capabilities with a RDNA 3 variant seemingly planned for a future smartphone family.

Apple iPhone 15 Pro Series Without Ray Tracing:

Apple iPhone 15 Pro Series With HW-Accelerated Ray Tracing:

According to Apple, the A17 Pro features 4x faster performance in ray-traced applications with the demo showcasing a software-based and a hardware-accelerated comparison. The software-based solution only managed sub-10 FPS while the hardware-accelerated ray tracing demo delivered 30 FPS consistently.

Apple also points out its very rich App Store and Gaming ecosystem which brings high-quality apps to its users while supporting the best handheld controllers in the market such as PS5's Dual-Sense wireless. Furthermore, a major feature coming to Apple iPhone 15 Pro will be support for MetalFX upscaling.

Upscaling technologies have seen huge adoption in the PC and console space so it was about time that smartphones adopted