The A17 Pro delivers solid performance, as evidenced by its gaming performance with last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Apple certainly surprised us when it announced its latest iPad mini 7 with the same chipset, but with the notable downgrade of the SoC featuring a 5-core GPU instead of a 6-core GPU. There was one. Fortunately, this change doesn’t hinder the tablet’s gaming capabilities, as demonstrated by two titles, with the compact slate maintaining just under 60FPS.
With a maximum power consumption of just 6.1W, iPad mini 7 easily surpasses Honor of Kings and Genshin Impact with its amazing heat dissipation performance.
A larger device means the A17 Pro has more breathing space, not to mention extra space to dissipate heat effectively. According to tests conducted by S. White Review, each game ran for 20 minutes at the highest graphics settings, with device brightness at 350nits and Wi-Fi running in the background. We’re happy to report that the iPad mini 7 maintains nearly 60FPS in Honor of Kings and Genshin Impact. For those unfamiliar with the first game, it’s a massively multiplayer online battle arena, but it’s not as graphically intensive as Genshin.
As you can see in the image below, the frame time graph is very smooth, with the iPad mini 7 maintaining an average frame rate of 59.5FPS, consuming just 5W of power, and keeping the heat at the recommended threshold of 39.8 degrees Celsius. is well within the range. When it comes to Genshin Impact, the iPad mini 7 runs a little harder, but the tablet can still get 58.9FPS. This time the frametime graph shows that there were some micro-stutters in the gameplay. In any case, the power consumption increased slightly to 6.1 W, resulting in a temperature increase of 42.7 °C.
While both gaming tests show that the iPad mini 7 is more than capable of delivering healthy performance, it’s hard to play any AAA titles that previously ran on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. It will still be interesting to see how it handles. Thankfully, Apple isn’t charging anything free for its latest slate, as the 128GB Wi-Fi-only version is currently listed on Amazon for $499.99.
