I've bought every iPad Pro refresh since 2020 specifically for Genshin and recently started publicly sharing testing to show players what they can actually expect - proper testing results, not hyping up devices for clickbait or light gameplay as most of YouTube does.
This is 100% performance focused, from a Genshin player for Genshin players; I have no interest whatsoever in content creation but feel like there's a lot of purposeful misinformation being spread so this is to counter that.
Video:
The account is endgame with various C6s, and fully up to date. Testing done under 18°C/64° F air conditioning on full blast for an hour prior to testing, and throughout the test itself.
Summary
The Longstanding ProMotion Issue/Bug
There's a known ProMotion bug that Apple introduced in iOS 16.1 which makes it interfere with games and breaks smooth 60 (bug showcase here:
). They never fixed it, despite extensive reports here and elsewhere. If you disable ProMotion, smooth 60 is completely doable after throttling; if however you leave ProMotion on, the micro-stutter is constant. This applies even to graphically undemanding games.
Added research
I researched the engine a lot and at this stage, I'm 99% sure that 120 FPS will essentially never be playable smoothly no longer due to iPads/thermals, but due to engine processing limitations.
Genshin's engine was built for ~ iPhone 9-11 and while it has received many upgrades in the meantime, the game has a heavy forward renderer, expensive post-processing, high draw-cell counts, an old animation system, CPU bottlenecks, insufficient GPU pipeline and reliance, low dynamic scaling, large SOC spikes, no modern optimized Metal backends, super heavy alpha blending, poor batching, etc. etc. etc. They would need to rewrite half the engine to have it run at 120 and that is completely unfeasible in a game with millions of lines of code and with this kind of content delivery schedule.
So the answer to "when smooth 120" is unfortunately probably not for a long time. It simply wasn't built to be able to do so and it shows when I connect the dots from the data on the Metal HUD and purposely varied testing criteria.
If I had to guess, at the current pace of performance increases, M8 - M9 might be able to brute force this. But I'm 100% confident that even M6 with 2nm + a speculated vapor chamber will not - because it's no longer the hardware or the throttling that's the main problem here.
It's easy to prove this by cooling it externally and seeing the exact same GPU frame time spikes to 20-30 in super heavy particle-saturated combat despite no throttling from the iPad's side - the bottleneck is primarily the software itself and how it processes, less so the devices. Smooth 120 would require GPU frame times to remain below ~ 9 ms, which is very, very far away at the moment.
In addition, the fact that resolution settings produce smaller than normal FPS gains or losses is another clue that points in that direction.
This is 100% performance focused, from a Genshin player for Genshin players; I have no interest whatsoever in content creation but feel like there's a lot of purposeful misinformation being spread so this is to counter that.
Video:
The account is endgame with various C6s, and fully up to date. Testing done under 18°C/64° F air conditioning on full blast for an hour prior to testing, and throughout the test itself.
Summary
- Apple's stated 25 - 30% GPU increase is as advertised
- despite that, smooth 120 FPS is nowhere close to playable, which is as expected
- on average, sustained fights hover at 70-85 FPS, with dips into 60s occasionally
- this compares to M4's average of about 60-70 in fights with dips to low 50s (I posted abotu M4 here)
- Imaginarium Theater, Spiral Abyss and Stygian Onslaught behave the same; IT in particular has a lot of FPS drops due to taking a long time to finish and being demanding
- M5 performance brings only passive increases due to the chip, with the game itself not being any better optimized than it was. Last major optimization update that increased FPS was in 3.8 over 2 years ago; I made a post about it over on Reddit at the time detailing the increase with graphs and testing. There are still problems with M5 optimization like flickering water textures, as shown in the video (confirmed this on 2 M5 iPad Pros).
The Longstanding ProMotion Issue/Bug
There's a known ProMotion bug that Apple introduced in iOS 16.1 which makes it interfere with games and breaks smooth 60 (bug showcase here:
Added research
I researched the engine a lot and at this stage, I'm 99% sure that 120 FPS will essentially never be playable smoothly no longer due to iPads/thermals, but due to engine processing limitations.
Genshin's engine was built for ~ iPhone 9-11 and while it has received many upgrades in the meantime, the game has a heavy forward renderer, expensive post-processing, high draw-cell counts, an old animation system, CPU bottlenecks, insufficient GPU pipeline and reliance, low dynamic scaling, large SOC spikes, no modern optimized Metal backends, super heavy alpha blending, poor batching, etc. etc. etc. They would need to rewrite half the engine to have it run at 120 and that is completely unfeasible in a game with millions of lines of code and with this kind of content delivery schedule.
So the answer to "when smooth 120" is unfortunately probably not for a long time. It simply wasn't built to be able to do so and it shows when I connect the dots from the data on the Metal HUD and purposely varied testing criteria.
If I had to guess, at the current pace of performance increases, M8 - M9 might be able to brute force this. But I'm 100% confident that even M6 with 2nm + a speculated vapor chamber will not - because it's no longer the hardware or the throttling that's the main problem here.
It's easy to prove this by cooling it externally and seeing the exact same GPU frame time spikes to 20-30 in super heavy particle-saturated combat despite no throttling from the iPad's side - the bottleneck is primarily the software itself and how it processes, less so the devices. Smooth 120 would require GPU frame times to remain below ~ 9 ms, which is very, very far away at the moment.
In addition, the fact that resolution settings produce smaller than normal FPS gains or losses is another clue that points in that direction.