Player Vapor showcased GTA V running via emulation on the A20 Pro chip inside the iPhone 18 Pro Max. In the game's built-in benchmark city driving scene, the phone averaged 66 FPS, reaching around 80 FPS in other scenes; its performance was close to that of a GeForce GTX 1650 at similar graphics settings.
Video Showcase:
Apple has enabled mobile chips to run full AAA games starting with the A17 Pro. The A20 Pro, arriving in 2026, features a 7-core GPU and new packaging technology, while the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are also equipped with larger vapor chambers.
This demonstration used 1080p resolution and DirectX 11. Texture quality was set to high, with FXAA, 16x anisotropic filtering, and sharp shadows enabled; population density was at 75%, view distance scaling at 50%, and MSAA remained off.
Vapor stated that work on emulating GTA V is still ongoing, with a few minor issues yet to be resolved.
During sustained operation, the phone's passive cooling may limit chip performance. Wccftech believes that the A20 Pro's wafer-level multi-chip module packaging, which places DRAM separately, combined with the larger vapor chamber in the iPhone 18 Pro Max, helps maintain performance.
Previous comparisons in AAA games showed that the A20 Pro on the iPhone 18 Pro Max delivers up to a 50% performance boost over the A19 Pro on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, with a 77% improvement in 1% low frame rates. Previously, someone ran GTA V on the iPhone 17 Pro Max using the Xbox 360 emulator XeniOS, achieving just over 20 FPS. For this demonstration, Wccftech estimates that the A20 Pro's performance per watt is approximately 1180% higher than that of the GTX 1650.