Apple has doubled down on the iPhone 17 Pro's and iPhone 17 Pro Max's gaming performance by including the A19 Pro, prompting one person to attempt to run GTA 5 on the top-end flagship. Unfortunately, this experiment is only possible through emulation, and looking at the performance and subpar resolution you get, you probably wouldn’t want to try it out.

With the help of the XeniOS Xbox 360 Emulator, Redditor “mertbaris01” successfully managed to run GTA 5 on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. However, getting the game to run on iOS might have been the easier part because maintaining a solid framerate appears to be a Herculean task for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but that’s to be expected when you’re running a game through an emulation layer.

We’ve previously reported that the A19 Pro running in both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max can achieve up to a 69 percent performance improvement over the A18 Pro and A17 Pro, showing that Apple is serious about annual increments of its SoC’s gaming capabilities. The addition of a vapor chamber also helped, but in this case, it was of little use. Apart from running GTA 5 at a 1280 x 720 resolution, the metrics counter showed a laughable 19-20FPS.

When exploring the city with a helicopter, performance quickly dips down to 12FPS, not to mention that the iPhone 17 Pro Max was overheating. In short, we wouldn’t say that it was the A19 Pro’s shortcomings, but it was more to do with how XeniOS can be improved with frequent updates. Even if the iPhone 17 Pro Max was subjected to extreme levels of cooling, we doubt it would have a massive impact on the framerate.

Hopefully, by the time the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max launch with Apple’s A20 Pro , some notable improvements with the Xbox 360 emulator will arrive too.

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