Is there a drop in iPhone 16e GPU performance?

The iPhone 16e is the latest iPhone model just announced by Apple, and has immediately attracted a lot of attention from users when it is priced at a quite affordable level, only 599 USD.

But the saying “you get what you pay for” is never wrong. One of the big changes Apple made in this new version of the iPhone is the removal of a GPU core. The customized A18 chip in the iPhone 16e only has 4 GPU cores instead of 5 cores like in the iPhone 16, even though both use the A18 chip.

Early graphics benchmarks for the iPhone 16e have surfaced online, suggesting that the reduced GPU core count has affected the device's performance to some extent. The device, codenamed "iPhone 17,5" running iOS 18.3.1, scored a Geekbench Metal score of 24,188, first spotted by MySmartPrice. This is a roughly 13% drop from the Metal score of the iPhone 16 (27,669) and iPhone 16 Plus (27,772).

In real-world use, however, the difference may be negligible, as the A18 chip is still a very powerful chip at its core. Apple claims that the quad-core GPU is still powerful enough to handle “impressive graphics performance and a premium mobile gaming experience, supporting graphically demanding AAA titles and hardware-accelerated ray tracing for more realistic lighting and reflections.”

The benchmark results also reveal that the iPhone 16e is equipped with 8GB of RAM, which is in line with previous estimates of the device’s memory capacity. This is also the minimum requirement to run Apple Intelligence, as senior director Johny Srouji confirmed last year.

Meanwhile, there is still a question mark over the battery size that Apple has equipped the iPhone 16e with. Apple claims that the battery life of the iPhone 16e has been improved to up to 26 hours for video playback, 4 hours more than the iPhone 16 and up to 12 hours compared to previous models, including the iPhone SE 3 and SE 2.

The iPhone 16e will officially go on sale from February 28. We'll have a better look at how the reduced GPU core count affects graphics-intensive tasks and everyday operations as the device gets into the hands of more users.