The iPhone 14 Pro's Missed Chance at Ray Tracing: A Flaw Halts Apple's Plans

If you were disappointed by the graphics processing in the iPhone 14 Pro, it may be because Apple had originally planned to include hardware-accelerated ray tracing in the device. According to a recent report from The Information, a flaw was discovered in the GPU late in the phone's development that caused it to draw too much power. In order to improve the device's battery life and thermals, Apple had to switch the A16 Bionic chip's GPU to that of the previous generation A15 found in the iPhone 13.

This setback was reportedly a major one in Apple's hardware design history, leading to a shakeup in the company's graphics processing team and broader talent loss among the company's hardware design teams. If the iPhone 14 Pro had launched with ray tracing, it would have been able to compete with Android devices featuring Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform, which supports ray tracing and Unreal Engine 5.

While ray tracing is still mostly exclusive to current-generation game consoles and recent mid to high-end PC graphics cards, it is starting to appear on mobile hardware as well. Flagship devices like the Xiaomi 13 series, Moto X40, and Vivo X90 Pro+ are already on the market powered by Qualcomm's latest SoC, while others from Asus, OnePlus, and Sony are on the way.

Imagination Technologies demonstrated an early attempt at mobile ray tracing last year with its PowerVR IMG-CXT, and in June of this year, Arm announced the Immortalis G715, a mobile GPU supporting ray tracing and variable rate shading.

Unfortunately, Apple's mishap with the iPhone 14 Pro has put the device behind the competition in terms of GPU performance. Graphics processing benchmarks show that the A16 Bionic is behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and MediaTek's Dimensity 9200 – the first Immortalis G715 chip.

While the Apple Silicon version of Resident Evil Village currently lacks ray tracing, unlike the Windows, PS5, and Xbox Series versions, the game menu simply grays it out in the settings rather than removing it entirely. This could be interpreted as a hint that upcoming Apple Silicon was meant to support ray tracing. Once Apple is able to successfully incorporate ray tracing into its silicon, it is likely to appear in both mobile and desktop chips.