Apple’s new iPad Pro features M4 chip for smoother gaming

Apple has unveiled its brand high-powered M4 processor chip, which promises strong performance for the latest iPad Pro. As announced, the chip is designed to be more efficient and more powerful than its predecessor, enabling a crisper, smoother display with improved precision, colour, and brightness.

For those who enjoy gaming on iPad, the new M4 chip should allow for a better experience, particularly as Apple grows its lineup of compatible AAA games. Per Apple, the M4 will deliver up to “1.5x faster CPU performance over the powerful M2 in the previous iPad Pro” allowing users to push the upper limits of performance and graphics.

Already, we’ve seen games like Resident Evil Village running impressively on last generation iPhones, and we anticipate the M4 chips will unlock significantly improved performance on the new iPad Pros, which are becoming more powerful and laptop-like with every generation.

For the gamers, the new 10-core GPU of the M4s will allow a new feature known as Dynamic Caching, which “allocates local memory dynamically in hardware and in real time to dramatically increase the average utilisation of the GPU.” The result is significantly increased performance for demanding apps and games.

Read: Playing Resident Evil on an iPhone is very impressive, despite the quirks

The improved iPad Pros will also feature hardware-accelerated ray tracing, with a focus on enabling more realistic shadows, textures, and reflections in games for a “graphically rich experience.” In addition, the GPU allows for hardware-accelerated mesh shading, which delivers better geometry processing for more complex scenes.

You’re unlikely to spot these differences in lighter-touch games – let’s say, Apple Arcade’s Hello Kitty Island Adventure – but as Apple branches out into supporting new AAA titles, like the Assassin’s Creed franchise, these improvements will be necessary.

Elsewhere in its latest announcement, Apple has also confirmed the new iPad Pro models will feature a range of improvements designed to support creative workflows. The M4 boasts a “blazing-fast Neural Engine” which will aid features like editing in Final Cut Pro, LumaFusion, and StaffPad.

You can read more about the new generation iPad Pro models on the Apple website. As announced, these devices will launch from 15 May 2024.