A week ago, Apple’s latest Apple TV 4K went on sale, using the new A15 Bionic chip. Foreign technology media FlatpanelsHD conducted an in-depth test on it and compared it with Sony PlayStation 4/5 game consoles.
Apple TV 4K Performance Test
The A15 chip used in Apple TV 4K this year has 4 GPU cores, while the chip used in the iPhone 13 Pro series has 5 GPU cores. Also in terms of CPU cores, Apple TV uses 4 CPU cores, while the iPhone has 5 CPU cores.
Tests conducted by FlatpanelsHD show that this year’s Apple TV 4K is “approximately 40 percent faster” than the previous-generation Apple TV with the A12 chip inside. Apple claims it should be 50% faster, but the difference can simply be attributed to a difference in testing methodology.
Another change this year is that the new Apple TV 4K has no internal fans, resulting in a smaller and lighter design. How does this affect performance, cooling and throttling? The new Apple TV 4K actually throttles less than previous models.
In CPU benchmarks, the A15 is roughly 40 percent faster than the A12 in previous Apple TVs — less than the 50 percent improvement Apple claims. The reason for this is twofold: on the one hand it may have used a different testing method, and on the other hand we were surprised to see that the A15 is less throttled than the A12 given that the A15 is not actively cooled.
The 20-minute CPU stress test limited the A12 to 65 percent, while the A15 was limited to just 84 percent, meaning the new Apple TV 4K can maintain most of its CPU performance during long hours of heavy gaming.
Performance comparison with PS5 and Xbox One
CPU aspect
The CPU in the A15 Bionic is much faster than previous-generation consoles like the Xbox One and PlayStation 5. The CPU performance core of the A15 is also significantly faster than the PS5’s CPU core (single-core performance), but the PS5 leads the core performance in multi-core because it has 8 cores.
GPU aspect
As for the GPU, the Apple TV 4K (2022) specs have over 1 TFlops of graphics performance, but it’s somewhat vague as there’s no GPU info or benchmark app for tvOS. It still can’t match previous-generation consoles like the Xbox One in terms of TFlops performance, and it has half the RAM (4GB vs. 8GB).
Image via FlatpanelsHD
storage medium
The Apple TV 4K (2022), on the other hand, has faster RAM and is equipped with a very fast NVMe SSD, unlike the old-fashioned hard drives in previous generation consoles. In theory, both Xbox One and PS4 games should be playable on the Apple TV without too much sacrifice in quality or frame rate.
Apple has been trying to turn the Apple TV into a gaming device for years, with little success. These performance tests emphasize that the problem is not performance, but a lack of wider support from developers and game studios. These tests show little change in that department, but performance in available games continues to impress.