Abstract:
Apple’s latest A20 Pro chip is refreshing the outside world’s understanding of smartphone performance. The latest test results show that the iPhone 18 Pro Max equipped with A20 Pro can already run the classic open-world game "Grand Theft Auto V" through simulation and achieve smooth operation at a performance level close to the desktop-level graphics card NVIDIA GTX 1650.
This test was completed by the developer project Vapor. Although "GTA 5" has not yet officially launched the iOS version, the development team has successfully made the game run on iPhone 18 Pro Max and publicly demonstrated complete benchmark data.
According to the test results, under 1080P resolution and DirectX 11 environment, the average frame rate of the game in urban driving scenes reached 66FPS, and the average frame rate in other test scenes reached 80FPS.
To ensure a balance between image quality and performance, the test used high texture quality, FXAA anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering, 75% population density, 50% view distance scaling and sharp shadow settings, while turning off MSAA anti-aliasing.
Under these parameters, the running effect of "GTA 5" presented by the A20 Pro is close to the performance of the GTX 1650 graphics card under similar settings. Considering that this is a mobile phone processor and the game is still running in a simulated environment, this achievement is considered very groundbreaking.
What is more concerning is the power consumption performance.
Test data shows that while the A20 Pro achieves gaming performance close to that of the GTX 1650, its performance-to-power ratio is about 11.8 times that of the latter, which is an advantage of about 1180%. This means that Apple's latest mobile chip can complete similar graphics computing tasks with much lower energy consumption than traditional desktop graphics cards.
The developer stated that the current running of "GTA 5" on the iPhone is still in the ongoing development stage, and some compatibility issues and visual details have not yet been fully resolved, so the current results are not the performance of the final version. But even so, test results have proven that modern mobile phone SoCs are gradually entering performance areas that only PC hardware could achieve in the past.
Industry insiders believe that Apple’s continuous strengthening of mobile 3A gaming capabilities in recent years is an important foundation for achieving this achievement. Since A17 Pro took the lead in supporting console-level games, and now A20 Pro runs large-scale PC games, Apple is constantly promoting the development of mobile gaming platforms towards high-end development.
The A20 Pro's ability to achieve such results this time is closely related to the new generation of chip packaging technology adopted by Apple. Apple introduced the WMCM packaging solution for its 2nm flagship processor for the first time, moving the memory particles from the top of the chip to the side layout to free up more heat dissipation space for the processor.
At the same time, iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are equipped with a larger vapor chamber cooling system, allowing the A20 Pro to maintain high-performance output for a longer period of time without encountering temperature wall limitations prematurely.
Although smartphones still use passive cooling designs, and running large games under high load for a long time will still be affected by heat, test results show that the performance gap between mobile processors and traditional independent graphics cards is rapidly narrowing.
Analysts point out that a few years ago few would have believed that a smartphone could run a large open-world game like "GTA 5" with performance close to that of the GTX 1650. Now, with the continuous advancement of 2nm process, advanced packaging technology and mobile GPU architecture, mobile phone platforms are gradually gaining the ability to truly run 3A-level games.
For the entire mobile industry, the performance of the A20 Pro not only means that Apple’s chip strength has further improved, but also reflects that smartphones are gradually evolving into a new type of computing platform that can undertake lightweight PC entertainment tasks.
Comments