Recently, Apple released a new phone, the iPhone 16, and the performance changes of iOS 17 and iOS 18 have attracted widespread attention. After many tests, here we will take a look at how Genshin Impact performs on the latest iPhone 16.

As we all know, Genshin Impact is a very demanding game, and people have a hard time running it on previous generation iPhones, or even if they run it, it will quickly get hot. Therefore, I will perform a FLIR Thermal Test on the outside of the phone to see how hot it actually gets, and we will also talk about the much-discussed power consumption on the iPhone 16 at the end.

To give you some background knowledge, we played this Genshin Impact for about an hour in total, and we have downloaded it completely to the phone, so everything is local. We will show the results of testing it here and give you our thoughts and opinions.

Graphics Settings

Getting back to the point, I must say that we have been playing this game for a while and iOS 18 has brought us a very pleasant experience. Genshin Impact is smooth from the start, with a frame rate of about 40 to 60 FPS. We have turned the settings as high as possible, but there are no real performance issues.

Now let’s go to the settings before we continue. We will go to the graphics settings and turn it up to the maximum. In fact, we turned everything up to the highest in our Genshin Impact Account. The only thing we changed was the FPS and Motion Blur. We set FPS to 120 and set Motion Blur to off because I think you really don’t need Motion Blur. On the one hand, it is really annoying, and on the other hand, it is just an unnecessary burden on your system resources. Therefore, we generally turn it off when playing any game, and it actually doesn’t affect your Genshin Impact journey too much.

It is worth mentioning that if you maintain it at 25 FPS, you can hardly see any difference. Some people may think that this is because we did not maintain 120 FPS, but this is actually a fallacy. One is that it’s hard to keep it that high on iOS 18 at its current settings, and more importantly you can’t see a huge difference, anyway. So whether it’s 30 or 60 or even 120, you can’t tell the difference. Genshin Impact can run stably at relatively low levels, achieving the most optimized settings for graphics while ensuring stable operation.

Anyway, let’s take a quick look at the gameplay of Genshin Impact, which is very smooth. There is definitely a noticeable difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS when you change them in the settings, but this runs very smoothly. Even when we zoom in on the character, there are no frame drops. The character can be zoomed out, or jump around, just a little weird, but it doesn’t affect the gameplay. If you fast forward to some battles, you can see how smooth it is.

There is no doubt that the combat experience of Genshin Impact on the iPhone 16 is not a problem at all. Not only is there really no lag, no frame drops, but the actual quality of the graphics looks very good.

Heat Situation

The next thing we’re going to do is set a 30-minute timer on the phone, and we’ll continue to play Genshin Impact and then come back to see what the heat is like. Finally, we’ll also take a look at what performance is like.

After finishing the game, if we re-enter Genshin Impact, you’ll see that it still runs well without too many issues. Of course, the back of the iPhone 16 is definitely a little hot, so we’re going to pause for a moment.

For performance, we ran the game for a total of about half an hour at maximum settings, and during the run, we didn’t see any frame rate drops or anything like that. Overall, it was a very smooth and enjoyable experience.

Then what we’re going to do is run FLIR Thermal Test on the back of the iPhone 16. Surprisingly, this didn’t really make the back of the phone hot compared to Call of Duty Mobile, which we tried before.

Of course, the iPhone 16 still gets slightly hot after a long game run, but it’s not very obvious. It’s about 40 to 45 degrees Celsius, not too hot on the edge, and definitely not uncomfortable. So we can still hold it and play, but it may start to get a little hot after another hour or so of playing.

Power Consumption

Finally, let’s take a look at the power consumption of iOS 18 after a long run. After all, new features need to be built on the basis of power consumption.

After an hour of running Genshin Impact at maximum settings, we found that iOS 18 consumed 6% of the power, while the previous iOS 17 only consumed 4%. Therefore, we can find that the power consumption of iPhone 16 has increased slightly. However, this is also expected, because the models before the iPhone 14 series are at risk of increased power consumption.

However, because the use of mobile phones varies from person to person. Therefore, we need to understand that the quality of battery life depends on multiple factors, including system optimization, usage habits, hardware configuration, etc. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately determine which version of iOS loses power faster. Here, judging the power consumption by running Genshin Impact is only a reference.

According to the data released by Apple, in the new iOS 18 system, they have made a series of optimizations to battery life. It is said that the new system can effectively extend the use time of the device. However, whether this statement can be established requires a series of actual tests.

Final Thoughts

In short, after multiple tests, we are impressed by the performance of iPhone 16 in the past hour. It’s obvious to me now that the GPU core in this iOS 18 chip is designed for mobile gaming, and it performs particularly well on Genshin Impact. Like I said before, 30 to 40 minutes of playtime, maximum settings, 120 FPS, it will still give you a good gaming experience. What do you think about this? Welcome to discuss it together. See you next time!