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Aside from promoting iPhones as the best handheld device for everyone, Apple has always wanted to paint its creation as an ideal gaming phone. The Cupertino is making that attempt again with the iPhone 15, claiming the iPhone is “going to be the best game console.”
In an interview with American video game and entertainment media website IGN, three company executives (Jeremy Sandmel, Apple’s Senior Director of GPU Software; Tim Millet, VP of Platform Architecture; and Kaiann Drance, VP of Worldwide iPhone Product Marketing) underlined the gaming efficiency of the Pro models of its new iPhone 15 lineup.
The exchanges touched on the addition of the new A17 Pro chip in the units, which will reportedly give it the fastest performance among smartphones in the market. According to the company, A17’s CPU has 2 performance and 4 efficiency cores, claiming it is 10% faster. Meanwhile, it said its 6-core GPU is up to 20% faster for peak performance. During its Wonderlust event, Apple noted that the chip with a 3-nanometer architecture also brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Aside from those, the Pro modes are now armed with 8GB RAM.
Through these improvements, Apple hopes to make its iPhones “the best game console” in the future. The executives noted that the way to do that is not to compete with other consoles in the industry but to focus on creating the platform and device that will aid game developers in their work.
“I think we’re focused on the developers and the titles in the games,” Millet said in the interview. “Less on trying to compete with consoles. I think console is just a convenient way for us to talk about the classic games and the types of games that the developers that we’re targeting, the ones who have been successful in deploying there. We’ve done our best to try to deliver that same toolbox to the developers and we’re working hard with them.”
According to Millet, Apple’s work on iPhone 15 gives game developers all the essential tools to create the perfect games, adding it is up to them to figure things out.
“The display itself has a really amazing scaling technology built in,” Millet added. “The GPU can do scaling. So with features like ray tracing and mesh shading and this really advanced compute architecture, the developer has access to all of these algorithms to figure out what’s the best balance of compute and quality and performance and frame rate and resolution … So we designed the whole thing to make the gaming experience great, including making sure the performance and battery life is sustainable. We believe we have succeeded in doing that.”
This echoes Apple’s continuous goals for its gaming business, which makes things more exciting for Apple fans. And with the Vision Pro and iPhone 16 rumors teasing more gaming-focused improvements, Apple might indeed be heading in the direction of becoming an influential console competitor in the future.
