Apple recently launched the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max with the company's new A18 Pro SoC, and in its presentation, Apple claimed the new SoC offered up to 20% faster gaming performance than the previous generation. While this may be true in certain scenarios, recent testing in Alien Isolation has revealed that the A18 Pro's GPU still has some shortcomings when it comes to gaming.

According to the tests run by MrMacRightPlus, the Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max is barely able to maintain 30 FPS in Alien Isolation when running at its native 2868×1320 pixel resolution. While Alien Isolation is a AAA title that was ported to the iPhone, it is still a 10-year-old game, meaning it should be fairly easy to run. Lowering the in-game resolution, however, results in a substantial improvement to the A18 Pro's performance, with the game reaching 60 FPS after the change. This 30 FPS limitation may not all be down to a lack of performance from the A18 Pro SoC, though.Alien Isolation doesn't allow players to adjust in-game resolution, instead offering only "Graphics" and "Performance" presets, which adjust in-game resolution and quality settings. On the iPhone 16 Pro Max, switching to Performance still only lets the game top out at 60 FPS, as opposed to the 30 FPS limit imposed by the "Graphics" preset.

Despite the lower resolution and reduced details, Alien Isolation was still dipping to 30 FPS in certain scenes, which mostly looked like a consequence of loading textures and new environment models. Apple's main focus for the A18 Pro seems to have been in hardware-accelerated ray tracing and upscaling tech, which weren't implemented when Alien Isolation launched. For comparison, Santiago Santiago on YouTube has demonstrated Alien Isolation running at 80-120 FPS on the Steam Deck with all quality settings set to maximum, although that was at a resolution of 1280×800, which is similar enough to the "Performance" mode on the iOS version of the game.

MrMacRightPlus also notes that the phone did heat up after playing the game for a while, indicating that the hardware was being pushed, although clearly not to its limits. It's also interesting to see that the "Graphics" mode uses significantly more GPU memory compared to the "Performance" mode—around 500 MB vs. closer to 400 MB.

Regardless, it might be disappointing for some iPhone 16 Pro owners that their new devices won't be able to fully utilize the 120 Hz ProMotion displays in older titles. Performance should see significant improvements in more modern titles, though, since they are more likely to implement ray tracing and upscaling techniques that the A18 Pro can take advantage of.

Update Sep 27th: Added a brief mention of Alien Isolation's performance on the Steam Deck.