Digital Foundry Documents the iPhone 17 Pro’s Major Gaming Gains

Yesterday, Digital Foundry published their review of the iPhone 17 Pro, which as you’d expect, focuses on the Pro model’s gaming capabilities. Tested against iPhone 13 and 15 Pros and using a series of benchmark tests as well as real-world gameplay, Digital Foundry’s tests revealed significant improvements in several areas, including:

GPU performance;

Ray tracing capabilities;

Second-generation dynamic caching; and

Improved thermals.

Benchmarks are one thing, but Digital Foundry’s tests also revealed real-world benefits to the iPhone 17 Pro, such as:

a 60% performance increase over the iPhone 15 Pro on Resident Evil Village,

the elimination of freezing and big frame rate drops in Assassin’s Creed Mirage,

more reliable 30 fps gameplay in Death Stranding.

Those are significant improvements in just two generations of the A-series chips.

What really caught my eye, though, was the impact of cooling. The iPhone 17 Pro uses a vapor chamber and aluminum chassis to help cool the device and keep its chips running at full speed longer. When Digital Foundry placed the 17 Pro on a desk fan, it became clear just how important that cooling is.

Running a benchmark stress test with air blowing across the back of the iPhone 17 Pro reduced the performance drop by roughly 50%. With those sorts of results, I expect external cooling solutions like this X5s telescopic controller and FX5 Cooler combo from GameSir to become a popular accessory in the coming year, so of course, I’ve ordered one and will report back soon.