iPhone 15 Pro hardware-based ray tracing promises more realistic gaming

AppleInsider said:

The A17 Pro's new graphics capability is enabling a new generation of mobile games including Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding, all expected later this year. Also on deck is Assassin's Creed Mirage, expected in the first half of 2024.

These are good titles to get ported over. Nice to see Resident Evil 4, hopefully this will make it to Mac too.

A16 is around half the performance of M1 and about the same as the Steam Deck so A17 will be somewhere between A16 and M1.

M1 can run Resident Evil Village at 60FPS on medium quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbWz2o-QNQ

Steam Deck can run Resident Evil 4 at 40-60FPS at 720p:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH81G9nRn9M

Given that there is hardware raytracing now, that's likely to make it to Mac too with M3. That will help beyond games for raytraced rendering. They noted the speedup as 4x over software rendering so this will close the gap between the M-series Macs and higher-end Nvidia GPUs (M2 Ultra on page 2 at 1/4 the NVidia 4090):

Blender opendata

This won't be until later in 2024 but it's a very useful hardware feature. Nvidia had examples of how much their hardware RT improved rendering speed vs software:



It doesn't apply to the whole frame time but it reduces the lighting rendering part significantly, leaving an overall 2-3x speedup over software raytracing. Software raytracing isn't used much in games but for games, hardware raytracing increases the realism of the lighting, reflections and shadows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=088DZH9gP1c

Bringing AAA games to mobile is also a good strategy. The Mac doesn't have the userbase for gaming but iOS does so if AAA devs will be willing to port to iOS, it's a lot easier to target Mac after the iOS port is done. The full desktop titles are around 60-80GB so they will likely lower the texture quality for mobile and this will help with the lower memory available.

I wish they would bring this to the Apple TV already. They’re soooo close. 

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

The A17 Pro's new graphics capability is enabling a new generation of mobile games including Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding, all expected later this year. Also on deck is Assassin's Creed Mirage, expected in the first half of 2024.

These are good titles to get ported over. Nice to see Resident Evil 4, hopefully this will make it to Mac too.

A16 is around half the performance of M1 and about the same as the Steam Deck so A17 will be somewhere between A16 and M1.

M1 can run Resident Evil Village at 60FPS on medium quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbWz2o-QNQ

Steam Deck can run Resident Evil 4 at 40-60FPS at 720p:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH81G9nRn9M

Given that there is hardware raytracing now, that's likely to make it to Mac too with M3. That will help beyond games for raytraced rendering. They noted the speedup as 4x over software rendering so this will close the gap between the M-series Macs and higher-end Nvidia GPUs (M2 Ultra on page 2 at 1/4 the NVidia 4090):

Blender opendata

This won't be until later in 2024 but it's a very useful hardware feature. Nvidia had examples of how much their hardware RT improved rendering speed vs software:



It doesn't apply to the whole frame time but it reduces the lighting rendering part significantly, leaving an overall 2-3x speedup over software raytracing. Software raytracing isn't used much in games but for games, hardware raytracing increases the realism of the lighting, reflections and shadows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=088DZH9gP1c

Bringing AAA games to mobile is also a good strategy. The Mac doesn't have the userbase for gaming but iOS does so if AAA devs will be willing to port to iOS, it's a lot easier to target Mac after the iOS port is done. The full desktop titles are around 60-80GB so they will likely lower the texture quality for mobile and this will help with the lower memory available.

Which GPU will the M3 have in it then?

By the current pattern, the M3 would be based on the A16 but it sounds like this GPU would be a much-needed improvement for the Mac and probably pretty required for the VisionPro. Seem like the M3 could leapfrog the A16 and be based on the A17.

mattinoz said:

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

The A17 Pro's new graphics capability is enabling a new generation of mobile games including Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding, all expected later this year. Also on deck is Assassin's Creed Mirage, expected in the first half of 2024.

These are good titles to get ported over. Nice to see Resident Evil 4, hopefully this will make it to Mac too.

A16 is around half the performance of M1 and about the same as the Steam Deck so A17 will be somewhere between A16 and M1.

M1 can run Resident Evil Village at 60FPS on medium quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbWz2o-QNQ

Steam Deck can run Resident Evil 4 at 40-60FPS at 720p:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH81G9nRn9M

Given that there is hardware raytracing now, that's likely to make it to Mac too with M3. That will help beyond games for raytraced rendering. They noted the speedup as 4x over software rendering so this will close the gap between the M-series Macs and higher-end Nvidia GPUs (M2 Ultra on page 2 at 1/4 the NVidia 4090):

Blender opendata

This won't be until later in 2024 but it's a very useful hardware feature. Nvidia had examples of how much their hardware RT improved rendering speed vs software:



It doesn't apply to the whole frame time but it reduces the lighting rendering part significantly, leaving an overall 2-3x speedup over software raytracing. Software raytracing isn't used much in games but for games, hardware raytracing increases the realism of the lighting, reflections and shadows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=088DZH9gP1c

Bringing AAA games to mobile is also a good strategy. The Mac doesn't have the userbase for gaming but iOS does so if AAA devs will be willing to port to iOS, it's a lot easier to target Mac after the iOS port is done. The full desktop titles are around 60-80GB so they will likely lower the texture quality for mobile and this will help with the lower memory available.

Which GPU will the M3 have in it then?

By the current pattern, the M3 would be based on the A16 but it sounds like this GPU would be a much-needed improvement for the Mac and probably pretty required for the VisionPro. Seem like the M3 could leapfrog the A16 and be based on the A17.

Apple's going to be pushing pretty hard for the M3 gen SoCs to have the A17 Pro GPU, CPU and NE cores. As in, they would just delay M3 generation chips by 6 months to do it if they have to.

The NE and GPU cores are needed for machine learning applications, and that's where they basically put all the additional transistors with TSMC 3nm. Basically all new features are machine learning driven in some form or another.

mattinoz said:

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

The A17 Pro's new graphics capability is enabling a new generation of mobile games including Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding, all expected later this year. Also on deck is Assassin's Creed Mirage, expected in the first half of 2024.

These are good titles to get ported over. Nice to see Resident Evil 4, hopefully this will make it to Mac too.

A16 is around half the performance of M1 and about the same as the Steam Deck so A17 will be somewhere between A16 and M1.

Which GPU will the M3 have in it then?

By the current pattern, the M3 would be based on the A16 but it sounds like this GPU would be a much-needed improvement for the Mac and probably pretty required for the VisionPro. Seem like the M3 could leapfrog the A16 and be based on the A17.

It would be pretty crazy to put raytracing hardware in iPhones/iPads and leave it out of the Mac. Plus they've been using 5nm for 3 years now, it's time to move to 3nm.

It's a must for Vision Pro with the power saving and raytracing will allow more realistic rendering to blend with the real world.

I'm beginning to think they might have a March event where they launch M3 in a bunch of products - Vision Pro, MBA, iMac, possibly mini.