On December 24, citing foreign technology media The Information, that Apple originally planned to make a major upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro model’s GPU, introducing “ambitious” technologies including ray tracing, but ultimately had “unprecedented” difficulties in the development process because the technology was too difficult to implement. The new GPU was canceled late in the development process due to “unprecedented” difficulties in the technology implementation.
The paid report notes that Apple implemented ray tracing on the iPhone 14 Pro prototype, but it severely impacted the phone’s battery life and heat, among other issues.
After reaching out to several internal developers, they say Apple discovered late in the development of the device that the GPU in the iPhone 14 Pro model could not meet expectations and had to rush to use the GPU design from last year’s iPhone 13 series A15 Bionic.
This is a key reason why the iPhone 14 Pro models have changed significantly from previous generations, but not much in terms of GPU improvements. In the face of such failures, Apple decided to restructure the graphics processor team, which led to the departure of some managers and key people.
In video games, ray tracing is essentially a system that simulates the movement of light, interacting with other objects in the environment and eventually reaching our eyes. The light will reflect on the object, will penetrate something, and sometimes even be absorbed. All of these interactions require a lot of arithmetic to simulate, but ray tracing does just that to create a more realistic image.
