No surprise. With a simple raytracing shader (i.e. not-optimized, with massive dynamic branching and arithmetic operations), iPhone 5 easily achieved 26.5 fps, while iPhone 4 could only have 2.2 fps.

The test scene was simple. There was a red sphere, and a green triangle in front of it. A point of light was rotating around the sphere, lighting both objects, and cast shadow on the sphere.

iPhone 5’s PowerVR SGX543MP3 GPU is truly a performance monster among the family of mobile devices. It would have the potential to perform some of the effects which was only available to desktop PC or video game consoles.