In a major stride forward for mobile gaming, Apple announced during today’s event that console games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Resident Evil 4‘s remake, and Resident Evil Village are coming to the iPhone 15 Pro. These aren’t watered-down mobile spinoffs or cloud-streamed games either; they’re running natively with the help of the A17 Pro chip.
During the gaming segment of Tuesday’s Apple event, the power of the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chip was highlighted. The 3-nanometer chip has 19 billion transistors, a six-core CPU, a 16-core Neural Engine that can handle 35 trillion operations per second, and a six-core GPU that supports things like mesh shading and hardware-accelerated ray tracing in video games. Several game developers were featured following its introduction to explain and show off just how powerful the A17 Pro Chip is. While this segment started with games already native to mobile, like The Division Resurgence, Honkai: Star Rail, and Genshin Impact, it didn’t take long for some games made for systems like PS5 and Xbox Series X to appear.
Capcom’s Tsuyoshi Kanda showed up and revealed that natively running versions of Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 are coming to the iPhone 15 Pro before the end of the year. Later, Apple confirmed that Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which launches next month on PC and consoles, will also get a native iPhone 15 Pro port in early 2024, while Death Stranding is slated for a 2023 iPhone 15 Pro launch.
Historically, console-quality games like these have been impossible to get running on a mobile phone without the use of cloud gaming. Confirming that these three AAA games can all run natively on iPhone 15 Pro is certainly an impactful way for Apple to show just how powerful the A17 Pro chip is.