A18 Pro gets tested in Assassin's Creed Mirage, Death Stranding, and Resident Evil 4: Solid performance improvements with lower temperatures
Apple's recently launched iPhone 16 Pro Max features the company's most powerful SoC to date -- the A18 Pro. The chip positions itself as a strong contender in the high-end smartphone SoC segment, punching way above its weight class in single-core benchmarks, while being considerably more efficient than the competition.
In a recent YouTube video by MrMacRight portraying the A18 Pro's gaming capabilities, a detailed comparison was made against its predecessor, the A17 Pro-powered iPhone 15 Pro, across several high-profile gaming titles. The list included Assasin's Creed Mirage, Death Stranding, and Resident Evil 4. Apart from raw performance, the tests encompassed a plethora of other attributes including frame rate stability, thermal efficiency, and RAM usage.
Starting off with Assassin's Creed Mirage by Ubisoft, the A18 Pro-powered iPhone 16 Pro maintained a perfectly playable 30 FPS at high graphics settings, while suffering from minimal frame drops - a sizeable improvement over its predecessor, which had its fair share of struggles with stability in relatively intensive scenes. As indicated by the Metal HUD, the game utilized a whopping 5.3 GB of memory, while the iPhone itself hovered around 44.3 C - over 5 degrees cooler than the 15 Pro.
Next in line was Death Stranding, where the trend continued. The iPhone 16 Pro was not only better performing but also cooler than its predecessor. When modded for a 60 FPS limit at low graphical settings, the iPhone 16 Pro reached as high as 40 FPS, with occasional drops in more demanding sequences. Clearly, Apple's redesigned and improved thermal solution has been functioning as intended, with genuine improvements to performance.
Not much needs to be said about Resident Evil 4, as the iPhone 16 Pro maintains its trend of superior performance with cooler temperatures. In Resident Evil Village, however, things start to go a little sideways. Both the iPhone 16 Pro and 15 Pro crashed when the memory usage exceeded 6 GB, indicating a need for higher memory configurations in future variants. Despite that, the iPhone 16 Pro did outperform its predecessor by as much as 10 FPS, although both flagships hit their thermal ceilings eventually.
In Alien: Isolation, which happens to have been recently optimized for the Metal 3 API, the iPhone 16 Pro Max managed to maintain a respectable 60 FPS in most scenes, with memory utilization never crossing the 2 GB mark. Wreckfest by HandyGames was a similar story, with the A18 Pro managing a steady 60 FPS at maximum settings. The game required only 1.5 GB of memory, and temperatures remained at a cool 37.6 C.
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