• News

iPhone 15 Pro's new 3 nanometer A17 Pro chip GPU supports ray tracing

Apple's newest A17 Pro chip will have a substantial effect on mobile gaming.

Ozzie Mejia

September 12, 2023 11:21 AM

Apple

1

Tuesday's Apple Event continued with the future of Apple's A-series mobile processors. The A17 Pro, the newest Apple Silicon chip, promises to be Apple's most advanced processor to date. Not only will it offer faster processing on the iPhone 15 Pro, but it will also open the door to major PC gaming features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

Tuesday's Apple Special Event offered a brief glimpse of the iPhone 15 Pro's ray tracing capabilities. Powered by a six-core GPU, Apple's A17 Pro chip gives the iPhone 15 Pro the power to deliver real-time ray tracing at 30 FPS. This will allow Apple to bring major AAA titles like Resident Evil 4 and a mobile-exclusive version of Tom Clancy's The Division to their iPhone line and bring its visuals on par with current-generation consoles.

The A17 Pro uses a 3 nanometer process with 19 billion transistors to help boost overall performance. The Neural Engine will now process 35 trillion operations per second. Meanwhile, the switch to USB-C connections will allow for use of USB-3 controllers, which will run faster than the USB-2 speed peripherals supported by Lightning connections.

We'll have more on the A17 Pro chip and its effects on mobile gaming shortly. Keep it on Shacknews for the latest updates.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?