The A20 Pro, introduced in 2026, has pushed mobile gaming performance further than its predecessors: Apple’s move to a 7‑core GPU, new packaging, and a larger vapor chamber in the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max have produced performance close to that of a desktop GTX 1650 in a recent GTA V demonstration.
The game’s launch on the A20 Pro was carried out via emulation. An X user known as Vapor ran the built‑in GTA V benchmark on an iPhone 18 Pro Max and posted results showing roughly 66 FPS while driving around the city, with peak scenes reaching about 80 FPS. The test was performed at 1080p under DirectX 11, with texture quality set to high, FXAA and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled, population density at 75%, draw distance scaling at 50%, sharp shadows enabled, and MSAA disabled. Vapor notes that work on the GTA V port is still in progress and some minor issues remain.
Observers point out that simply adding more GPU cores would not guarantee these figures, since sustained workloads on a mobile SoC are constrained by passive cooling. Wccftech credits the A20 Pro’s improved sustained performance to Apple’s shift to Wafer‑Level Multi‑Chip Module (WL‑MCM) packaging for the 2‑nm chip—placing DRAM separately from the compute die—and to the enlarged vapor chamber used in the iPhone 18 Pro Max.
Previous comparisons between the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro Max already showed a clear lead for the newer chip: Apple’s A20 Pro was reported to be up to 50% more powerful than its predecessor, with 1% low figures improving by 77%. That jump is also visible in GTA V emulation: earlier attempts to run the game on an iPhone 17 Pro Max using the Xbox 360 XeniOS emulator produced barely more than 20 FPS, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max now manages roughly 66–80 FPS. Wccftech estimates the A20 Pro’s advantage over the GeForce GTX 1650 in performance per watt at approximately 1180%.