iPhone 14 Pro Gaming and Performance Review

iPhone 14 Pro introduces Dynamic Island, a magical new way to interact with iPhone. The phone also features groundbreaking safety features designed to save lives, an Always-On display, and an innovative 48MP camera for mind-blowing detail. All powered by the ultimate smartphone chip. Dynamic Island will bubble up music, sports scores, FaceTime, and so much more -- all without taking you away from what you’re doing. Its 31% smaller TrueDepth camera system is engineered to free up display space and be even more capable. A re‑engineered proximity sensor now detects light from behind the display, saving additional space. Advanced display algorithms make Dynamic Island responsive wherever you tap, swipe, or hold. iPhone 14 Pro features a beautiful surgical-grade stainless steel and textured matte glass design in a 6.1-inch display, with Super Retina XDR visuals and a new 1Hz refresh rate. The phone's A16 Bionic chip unlocks unparalleled experiences with a 6-core CPU that is up to 40 percent faster than the competition and easily handles demanding workloads. The iPhone 14 lineup also introduces Emergency SOS via satellite, which combines custom components deeply integrated with software to allow antennas to connect directly to a satellite, enabling messaging with emergency services when outside of cellular or Wi-Fi coverage.

The iPhone 14 Pro is extremely fast thanks to the new A16 Bionic chip, which is exclusive to the new iPhone Pro models this year. Apps open quickly, switching apps feels instantaneous, and iOS 16 runs consistently smooth especially when watching the Dynamic Island grow and shrink constantly.

That said, the performance difference between the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro isn’t really perceptible. Even the Geekbench 5 scores (seen below) don’t show a gulf of difference either. What makes the A16 Bionic special really comes down to the more efficient 4-nanometer process helping to extend battery life – but we’ll get more into this later.

iPhone 14 Pro: 1,889 (Single), 5,120 (Multi)

iPhone 13 Pro: 1,747 (Single), 4,531 (Multi)

All this performance makes the iPhone 14 Pro fantastic for playing games. This phone has no trouble keeping up with the latest Apple Arcade games like Shovel Knight Dig and Fantasian. More impressively, you can play indie games that were once only available on console and PC like Gris+ and Goat Simulator+. The graphical power of the iPhone 14 Pro is awe-inspiring.

iPhone 14 Pro cameras

    Finally, a 48MP quad-pixel sensor

    Upgrades across the board for the three lens array

    TrueDepth camera gains autofocus

Apple hasn’t changed up the camera array’s design, but virtually everything about the iPhone 14 Pro’s three rear cameras is new. The three lenses are: 48MP wide (24mm f/2.8) 12MP ultra-wide (13mm f/2.2) 12MP telephoto (77mm f/2.8) These are new lenses and larger sensors, and the most interesting camera is, undoubtedly, the 48MP sensor. This is Apple’s first pixel-binning sensor, and that means it captures 12MP images, with four pixels combined into one effective larger pixel; which results in better low-light performance and color fidelity. I’m glad Apple has implemented this, though it’s certainly not ground-breaking – Samsung’s been doing pixel-binning for a while now (which it's not alone in), and the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra features a 108MP camera with nine-pixel binning potential. The 48MP sensor adds the ability to shoot full-resolution raw images, although you have to enable this option in the camera settings – you won’t see raw as an option in the camera app by default. Raw images are uncompressed photos that give you greater latitude for editing in Adobe Photoshop and mobile apps like Adobe Lightroom (you can also edit them in the iPhone’s native camera app). We downloaded some photos to a PC (as DNG files) and edited them in Lightroom, and loved having that extra degree of control; although it’ll be overkill for most users. The ultra-wide camera still has a 120-degree field of view, but is now backed by a bigger sensor for better low-light performance – the photos we took bear this out. We like wide-angle imagery well enough, but what really floats our boat is macro photography. When Apple added macro to the iPhone 13 Pro – at first without the ability for users to control when it was activated – we weren’t that impressed. The Macro mode on the iPhone 14 Pro – which uses the ultra-wide lens – is a different story. It’s clearly making use of the sharper lens and massively improved light performance of the new sensor, meaning close-up images can look breathtaking. We wish Apple had gone further than 3x optical zoom with the 12MP telephoto lens, however. It’s a good camera, but you can get 10x optical zoom with the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, not to mention that phone’s insanely highly interpolated 100x Space Zoom. And you still can’t take good-looking moon shots with the iPhone. Apple does have one more zoom option, although it’s actually part of the primary sensor, rather than a separate lens; with a central 12MP section of the new 48MP snapper, used for 2x zoom shots. This means you get 12MP pixel-binned stills and really good-looking 2x zoom photos from the same lens, and it’s also a great tool for Portrait mode shots too. On the video front, Apple has upgraded Cinematic Mode to support 4K 30fps. Footage looks great, and every time you use this mode you’ll feel like a real cinematographer. There’s also a new video mode: Action, which you enable by selecting the tiny running-man icon in the upper-right section of the camera app. Because the digital stabilization technology employed in this mode works by cropping away excessive movement until you have a smooth subject in the center of your video. Action mode shooting tops out at 2.8K rather than 4K and works well, as long as you understand that you’re losing visual information every time you shoot. Apple has not added 8K video – and, honestly, we don’t miss it at all. Across the board, this is a good imaging system, and that’s surely due in part to Apple’s new Photonic Engine, which takes Apple’s Deep Fusion image technology and moves it to the front of the pipeline, applying it to uncompressed images, which results in better light and color performance (read more about it in our full iPhone 14 camera explainer, if you're curious). Apple could have done more here in the zoom and megapixel department, but the iPhone 14 Pro still represents the start of something special in the field of Apple iPhone photographic technology and remains one of the best camera phones on the market, based on our time with it.