Apple A16 Bionic Was Supposed To Support Ray Tracing But Was Dropped At The Last Minute

 This year's A16 Bionic chip is the most powerful chip for smartphones in terms of CPU performance. In the Geekbench 5 test, the A16 Bionic is still ahead of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. But in terms of GPU performance, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip is still ahead. The A16 Bionic GPU performance improvement compared to the A15 Bionic is slight and this is delayed for certain reasons according to a report by The Information.

While in the design phase, the A16 Bionic GPU supports Ray Tracing features. In the tests done it consumes too much power to the point of causing the iPhone's battery life to be severely affected as well as causing heating issues. Therefore, at the last moment the ability of Ray Tracing was canceled on the A16 Bionic.

The latest chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Samsung started supporting Ray Tracing this year but still no applications use it. At the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 launch event, Qualcomm showed some demos developed by them and Oppo. The first application to support Ray Tracing on smartphones is War Thunder Edge which will be launched next year.